Memphis Blues Again: February 2012

26 February 2012

Memphis Blues Again: Book I, Chapter 6.

. . . .Floriography, that's the word. Bloomspeak. Odds and ends. Give the gift that keeps on giving. The severed sexual organs of plants. Usually hermaphroditic, he/she blossoms on a stem.
From above and beyond the infirm ramparts of five-foot high, imperfectly acoustic-damping fiberboard, all around her she heard the unceasing dissonance of ringing phones, twenty-some hands clattering at keyboards, the occasional gastro-similitudenous (Similitogenous? Similitogeny recapitulates philology.) gurgling of a water cooler, the phony pleasantries of telephonic information conveyance (Oh, no problem at all, glad to be of assistance. That's why we're here. Damned morons. Takes longer to call than to look it up. Don't these people know how to work a search engine?) and slightly sharply malice-edged whispery gossip exchange (And then he. . . .And then she. . . .) schmatta schmatta schmatta of vacuous interoffice half-hushed chitter-chatter.
Jessie sat in her narrow, L-shaped cubicle on the eleventh floor. Functional office chair on rollers, faintly buzzing functional fluorescence high overhead (the natural daylight didn't penetrate this deeply into the workers' chambers) with a small, non-regulation desk lamp clamped to a divider pouring down its truly practicable hard incandescence upon a small, functional desk. A semi-transparent plastic static mat was on the cold tiled floor under her chair. The wheels of the chair had a way of hanging up on its edge. The office computer pushed back as far as it would go into the corner to make room for her own laptop. A big, lidded, stainless steel coffee mug close by.
She used to feel as though she were laboring inside a droning hive of bees, except that metaphor failed because bees were industrious and purposeful, while her own fellow workers were generally less cerebral and goal-directed than those in the outside world might suppose as they gazed with awe up at the steel and glass temple to erudition that was SPL-Central. No, it was more like drudging within an ant den whose feebly hushed, scratchy acoustic signal had been radically, insanely amplified. Ants were more slavishly unthinking than bees, skittering about like mindless automatons, running into walls, recoiling, slightly altering course, resuming a boozy random walk through life, accomplishing anything useful only by accidental, dumb, instinctual group effort. Her colleagues might be able to accomplish as much, she imagined, three or four of them joining together to elevate and lug a giant crumb over their heads from one subterranean cavern to another. But if this were a den pressed flat between planes of glass, then whom, she wondered, might be peering in? Whatever they might hope to find, those pedantic and bookish voyeurs, they must often be disappointed.
No doubt God was likewise disillusioned, on a somewhat larger scale.
A long run of multicolored books was arrayed along a side table that was shoved into her allotted narrow space. One night last year Hallohan had helped her purloin the table from the fourth floor conference rooms. He was one of the night watchmen, absolutely bald, polyhedral skull, prominent veins at the temples, big hands, large white eyes, skin thinly milky sweetly mocha, and a bighearted collaborator smile with perfect teeth. The table left her cubicle even more cramped, but she'd found she could not work without the additional surface area. At present most of the books on the side table were related to Martin Luther King, Jr and the Civil Rights Movement, around twenty volumes that she'd obtained from the stacks during the last several days. Her supervisor had noticed them yesterday and asked her about it. An article she was thinking of writing, she'd replied. And. . . .who could say? Maybe someday she would write such an article.
Just this moment she wasn't thinking about billowing clouds of tear gas or burning, hollowed-out carcasses of roadside busses. Instead, she sat regarding a slender green glass vase containing three large purple irises that had just been delivered.
Fleur-de-lis, she thought, symbol of New Orleans. He would have thought of that too. When the Saints come marching in. Of course. Irises. Good news? No, a message of regret. Not even that. Patch things up and go forward. Seal the book.
A concealed message one aspires to transmit. Concealed even from one's self? Maybe. The self-censoring aspirant. Aspirate, that's to inhale, to snort or to suck. Asperity is harshness or roughness to the touch, or to the feelings. To cast aspersions upon, to sprinkle liberally with slander, or worse: to sprinkle with liberal slander. Crime of the century. Dirty word, liberal. To Baptize in fiery Christ's blood, turning blood into wine into water. To undismayedly imbibe that blood just pretend it's wine.
Well, he had a point. Or rather, a significant judgment might be extracted from his faltering diplomatic efforts. Let bygones be bygones. It was all clumsy human interaction anyway. Just personal. No malice intended. No harm, no foul. The genes pulled the chariot; the charioteer was just along for the ride, no matter how tempting it was to flatter the intellect. The deepest language was sublingual, involving flashfloods of hormones and dopamine reward systems, and how could off-the-cuff verbal murmurings, skimmed from the curds rising at random up out of the subconsciousness, be expected to compete with that? Sometimes verbal communications and expectations must fall flat. Let. It. Go.
Nearby, someone laughed overly loud in response to a dim pun uttered by a passerby. Her eyes automatically flicked up above the flowers to the top of the cubicle wall in time to see the jester's retreating head. He was infamous in the office for his relentless wordplay and groaners. Not actually a bumbler like most of them, she knew; in fact, she suspected a more cunning intellect at work behind his eyes than he let on. His jokes were probably just a way of trying to make it through the day inside the hive. He disappeared and she looked down at the flowers again.
The king's spear is asphodel, daffodil, she thought. Another language. Wide wildflowery fields in the early morning light. Elysian immortals. I mourn with thee; I feel thy pain; or, confusion; uncertainty; unrequited love. Yes, it's all daffodil jumbly-tumbly: to strive for, or to inspire, or to breathe, spirit moving on the face of the deep, endeavoring to obtain, yearning for, reach out your arm.
Desire. Ooh, dangerous desire. Almost almost. Lacanian yearnings forever receding just beyond one's reach. Sisyphean frustrations. Once non-elliptical Nabokov's proboscis-snout greedily sucked up that nectar with his flittery-fluttery lepidopteron lexicology. But then he went and expired on us didn't he, dammit, dramatically enough though I admit like an Olympian diver into that final, fateful, purple, pitching sea of no return with an unforgettable triple moan of descending pitch. . . .The nosegay of the senses grows unavoidably compensated. Embeds us all in the fleshy-drab quotidian present.
She broke her gaze from the vase with its flowers and swiveled her chair to look back past the books on the side table and into the crowded labyrinth of other cubicles beyond. Voices. Blah blah. Bzz brngzt. Ha ha. Small talk. Of what use? Like the clucking of barnyard hens. It was so hard to find others with whom you could talk, really and truly intercommunicate. Noises. Changing and unchanging.
As great books are wasted on lesser readers, enchanting raconteurs require skilled listeners, rapt attention, in plastic wrapped. Dissect and prune out the larynx sparing the jugulars. Don't talk. Listen.
If you need to be spoon-fed your own world, there's always Redbox. Hulu. I will not pander.
Pale, secretive, heretical young Thomas kneeling all Platoesque at Vlad's feet. If you wanna learn anything you gotta be a dweeby satellite tightly elliptic-orbiting the teacher at the front of the class. By rhetoric was young Thomas fangfully impaled, entangled in his own second order equations of plunging payloads across the channel ax² + bx + c that bend rainbows between directrix and his other focus.
She allowed herself a sigh and then pivoted back to her small, functional desk. Closing her eyes to better blot out her surroundings, she leaned forward slightly in her chair to smell the flowers.
Nice.
The lingering senses are too sharp and prepossessing. They get in the way of memory. Rewrite the past in a discursive, disjunct present vernacular. But musical phrases and aromas can trigger memory like an avalanche, like floral fragrances delicately wafting. Then stereoscopic remembrances of things past vie for today, for the present, for the now. Proust. He was a weak asthmatic. Physical weakness sharpens artistic senses through another compensatory process. The whiff of the rose, and lost time is found again.
She opened her eyes. Poof: back in her cubicle.
He meant well. Epigraph.
The gift that keeps on giving until wilt sets in so quickly and undermines it. What kind of useless language is that? Self-sabotage.

24 February 2012

Gwen Harmon, National Civil Rights Museum Rep, Discusses Accuracy Of 'The Help'

Read the article here.

14 February 2012

PBS: Slavery by Another Name.

PBS: Slavery by Another Name. Watch it here.

12 February 2012

Memphis Blues Again: Book I, Chapter 5.

Behind him, high up in the crisp afternoon light, the red white and blue snapped smartly in a stiff breeze, its ribbons like rivers rippling over the wide land. Though about seventy yards away, the flag's assertive popping and ruffling was easily heard where Max knelt on the green turf.
The air felt cold to him. His throat was raw. His hands were balled up in the pockets of his jacket with its collar turned up. The black felt hat helped keep his head warm.
He lifted his eyes to peer eastward. It seemed to him that the lawn had been stretched taut across the spongy, clayey soil underfoot. The soft soil was unlike the compacted, sun burnt caliche of the desert Southwest. That hardpan was so different from here. A few hours in a plane and the whole world had shifted. He was still trying to get his bearings.
No one else was here. He was alone on this quest. Flynn, yes, but no family. No friends. No one else to feel what he felt.
Numerous deciduous trees denuded of their leaves were scattered across the grounds. They bore millions of brown fingering branchlets and twigs up against a sky turned a muzzy blueberry color from remote dapples of stratospheric frost. Pools of last season's golden brown oak leaves lay damp on the surrounding hills.
He knew what his friends said about him behind his back. He's changed. Lost his sense of humor. The Max before and the Max after.
Friends.
The river must curl along down there not far away, he knew. But it was not visible from where he squatted before one of the hundreds of white markers that were arrayed with perfect geometric precision in the groves of the dead.
Ghosts might have purposely guided me to this place.
He imagined the walls of an invisible maze shifting and moving across months, across years, to insure his tracks directed him here. The long hours that preceded discovery of the grave's location flittered across his consciousness. Digging through old documents. Piles of papers, and trying to keep track of them all. Order. Eyes blurring over page after page of nearly illegible census records. Reconstructing a long-extinguished human life. Or reigniting it, like a snuffed out candle. The weeks Flynn and he had lost down blind alleys, often expecting them to prove fruitless but determined to positively exclude false leads. It was scrupulous work, up close and blinkered, while outside a forgotten and neglected world whirled along in the troubled present, well removed from his concern.
The ashes of uncounted hours lay behind him. Genealogy. It wasn't the sort of pastime you could explain away. It wasn't a hobby, although others could see it no other way. It was the discovery that the past is no less immediate than the present. Neglected memories of white bleached bones. Present and past are one. You heard the faint hint of a Siren's song calling from far away, calling to something in the blood. Once you heard it, once you could pick it out against the din, it became irresistible. No use anyone bothering to call your name. Those people of another century had determined who he was. They had made the crazy world in which he found himself. Could he owe something to them?
Maybe.
The new Max. Fiction or nonfiction? Nonfiction. Sports or philosophy? Philosophy. The Dark Knight or Schindler's List? Take a guess.
It doesn't matter what anyone says. Things happen. The person you are dies and a new person emerges. But you can't tell them about it until it's happened to them, and then you don't have to. Like Larry Darrell's transformation in The Razor's Edge. The Bill Murray movie, not Maugham's lousy novel. Tuned in by accident on the late-late show in college. A jolt to the old Weltanschauung.
He was glad to have found this place. He was glad to be here. His heart was light. He imagined he could feel it beating.
Happiness in a graveyard. Try explaining that to them.
No one else was visiting the cemetery this afternoon. He guessed no one came on many afternoons. When places of mourning become museums. Except for the breeze ruffling the flag at his back and the soughing of the trees, it would have been very quiet. He felt strangely connected to all things, to the flag, to the unseen river flowing as it had flowed for centuries, to the brittle, fallen leaves that had endured less than a single year, to these rows and rows of voiceless headstones. Especially he felt connected to the body that lay under a few feet of mud before him.
He lowered his eyes again to the marker. He reached out with his fingertips, running them over the letters and numbers raised against the buff-discolored soapstone.
THOS. BAINBRIDGE, CO. I, 43 MO. INF.
Max thought of the body as a physical object, a desiccated and withered remnant cast aside by dispassionate time. Whatever remained could hardly encompass more material substance than a few handfuls of wind-blown oak leaves. A few pounds, maybe. But human remains, even severely decayed scraps, were a significant physical fact. This grave, near a river gliding along under fallen hills, held locked away tangible proof of a human being's passage. Once upon a time a man had lived and breathed upon the earth. Not half a mile away from where his body now lay interred he'd once been stuffed into a crowded steamer, leaving St Joseph behind, chugging forward to meet his fate. Driving onward into unknown danger. It was Heart of Darkness drama. It didn't come through in old census records, maybe, but Old Tom too had possessed a beating heart within his chest. Surely he had loved and hated and feared. He had seen marvels and endured tedium. He had been born, expelled naked past uterine walls; he had grown up in a childhood's bright and shining world; he had been touched by tragedy, wounded in love; he had lived and fathered and aged; he had experienced humiliation and solitude; he had suffered and he had died.
Flynn and he knew and understood Old Tom better than anyone else. With the exception of Old Tom himself, and maybe the woman who had been his wife for a few years, Max believed he understood Old Tom better than anyone else ever had.
But that heart beats no more. His bones are cold as the ground around them. Does some other drum, Max wondered, beat for the dead? Does a wraith of Old Tom watch me now, appreciating this improbable conjunction across the years? Maybe looking down from up around the whipping flag. The United States. United. That wasn't always a foregone conclusion. Could Old Tom ever have had the faintest notion that one day his fourth great grandson would pay homage at his gravesite? Impossible.
Sometimes life bites into your body and chews you up for a while before moving on to more lively prey. It happened to Old Tom, too. You'd be foolish to look for justice at a time like that. Justice is just like any other human invention, like an iPod, or the barcode, or the zipper. Or the Minié bullet. Not a law of nature restoring balance for the benefit of overly sensitive human beings. The law of the jungle rules the natural world with an iron fist. Eat or be eaten, no warranty given or implied. How can you reconcile that with a conscience? A conscience is about as useful as an appendix or wisdom teeth. Do what with it. Forget it. Rationalization is the preferred method for getting through the day. Rationalization is reliable. It's the most popular approach, and there's always strength in numbers.
Old Tom died in 1919. How many decades separated them? 2010 minus 1919, hmm, the difference between 1919 and 1910 ‑‑ that's nine ‑‑ less than a hundred. Ninety-one years. That's right? Yes, because 1910 would have been a century. Twenty, forty, sixty, eighty. . . .four score and eleven years ago he died. More time than separated Lincoln from Washington. Bloodlines halved by spouses, and halved again, and again, and again. In terms of genetics, after enough generations your ancestors are statistically indistinguishable from strangers. Strangers share more commonality with you than you might think.
It was unclear to Max whether anyone from the Bainbridge family had visited this grave. Ever. He might be the first. Perhaps Old Tom's son had; then again, perhaps not. Old Tom had almost been erased from memory.
Max thought: Never again.

Memphis Blues Again: Book I, Chapter 4.

In Page County, Iowa, there lived a man named Captain Conner who had a droopy, sandy brown moustache and alert brown eyes under the shadow of his hat. Captain Conner had come to Page County from Maryville, too. He always wore a brown suit from which dangled a gold watch chain. He owned the old Stonebraker Mill. He might have something like a slight smile under his moustache, but if so, it was not to be believed. His eyes would be drilling in whenever he looked at someone. Everybody called him Captain Conner even though really he was a judge. Sometimes they saw him by chance when Cutter took the wagon to buy supplies in the little town. It was not really a town but just a crossroads with a dry goods store. One cool spring day Tom watched both men when they happened to meet at the store. He could tell that Captain Conner did not approve of Cutter very much, but Tom didn't know why. Maybe he just didn't like Cutter's looks. Tom could understand that. Captain Conner fixed his stabbing gaze on Cutter, and the dirt-streaked farmer turned his back on the other man, pretending to ignore him. Tom could sense the shared dislike between the two. It was quiet in the store except for the creaking boards. Tom had never heard Cutter say anything about Captain Conner one way or another. Not that Cutter ever spoke much about anyone or anything. He certainly never spoke to Captain Conner if their paths happened to cross, and Captain Conner never spoke to him either, or even nodded to him. He only watched. At Mr Hawley's store Tom barely had time to look at the peppermint jar while Cutter swiftly conducted his transactions. Mr Hawley with his wireframe spectacles wanted to discuss Kansas and Nebraska opening up, but Cutter would not talk. He collected his purchases and immediately they went out to the wagon and started back for the little farm where they lived down on the East Branch. Tom looked back and saw Captain Conner out at the end on the porch of the store, watching the wagon go around the curve and disappear into the trees.
They were not completely isolated in Iowa. AP Rickarts had a little cabin close to the store in town. But AP was an old bachelor who had only been in Page County for a few months, and Ma seemed to hardly know him, although she said they were kin from Tennessee. Down in Nodaway County of course were Aunt Louisa and Uncle Ezra, and they were not too far away. And the Shumers lived in Gentry County. They were related to Ma's own mother's folks. Tom had not seen the Shumers in a long time, and he could not really remember them, but sometimes Ma talked about them. Tom wondered if Ma missed her mother, who was his grandmother. But she had died a long time before Tom was born.
One of Isaiah Cutter's uncles, Vernon Clark Cutter, had a store of his own in Clarinda, which was a small village about ten miles away. They only saw Clark Cutter and his old gray, unhappy wife once or twice when they happened to travel to Clarinda, but they never stayed overnight, even though he was Isaiah Cutter's kin. About the only difference between Page County's two towns was that Clarinda had two intersections and Hawleyville had one. Vernon Clark Cutter was a big man with a pasty face. He wore a white apron in the store. He was quiet and secretive and he never smiled. His head looked like a great big egg, Tom thought, and he hoped he could be there to see when it finally hatched. Tom was glad they never stayed overnight in Clarinda because Clark Cutter's boys were already old and moved away from home and there was nothing to do there. Last year after Victoria was born Clark Cutter got in some trouble for selling liquor in Clarinda. There were stories that Tom overheard about how Captain Conner had tried to connect Isaiah Cutter to the crime, but his involvement was never proven.
Years later Tom would think that those had been good days in Iowa, but they only lasted a few years. Cutter worked the farm and Ma kept the house and looked after Hiram and Victoria. Frank and Mary and he had their chores, but also they had plenty of time to play. Of course there was Frank to look out for, but after he got tired of bothering them he would go away and they might not see him the rest of the day. Frank had his own friends who were older boys and not the kind that Tom liked. Once at the store in town Ma bought some pencils and some paper for the three bigger children, and especially Tom liked to draw. Also they had brought Ma's pony up from Missouri, and Mary and he would sometimes ride him together in the mornings. Tom liked to go fishing in the East Branch with some of the other boys from up the road around Hawleyville in the afternoons when Mary had to take her nap with the babies. This pattern held steady every day for a long time until they opened the log schoolhouse with its oiled paper windows, but luckily he only had to attend school for a few months. It was his first school ever. By now Tom was eight years old.
Cutter spent his days in the fields, but he couldn't keep ahead of the weeds, and his rows were never very straight. Too many big rocks in the fields turning the plow, he said. As long as Tom knew him, Cutter never made a good crop. Sometimes Cutter made Frank help him on the farm. Frank was strong enough despite his age, and anyway Frank made too much trouble at the school. Frank kept growing bigger and bigger while Tom seemed to remain the same. Cutter sometimes cursed Tom for being too lazy and too small to help on the farm. Usually though Cutter didn't bother to speak but was quick to fetch the switch when the children were close at hand.
It was a bitterly cold winter, and they all had to stay inside the little house close together for a long time. It was hard to do. Cutter got mad whenever the babies would cry, and Frank was always trying to make problems. Once he took some of Tom's drawings and put them on the fire. Then Tom was more angry than he had ever been before, and he started yelling and hitting Frank with both his fists. Then the babies were all crying and Ma was trying to pull them apart, but it was Cutter who broke them up and took Tom outside into the snow with the switch, and because of the cold it seemed to hurt like never before, but still Tom didn't care because he was so mad about the drawings.
The winter seemed like it would go on forever, but the snow and ice finally melted. Then it was wonderful to finally be outside with the wildflowers and the tall grass. When they went to town there were all kinds of stories Mr Hawley wanted to tell about the Kansas Territory, and something about a war they might have with Spain. But as usual Cutter didn't care about any of it. He conducted his business, and they hurried back home.
Spring came and went, passing on into summer. The air became flat and hot. When it was especially hot out, or when it was late in the evening when the sun had gone down and he couldn't see to work anymore, Cutter would meet Clogan at the other man's barn, which wasn't much of a barn but only some old gray boards hobnobbed together. If you were careful you could sneak up on them behind some bushes and listen to them cussing and chewing tobacco and drinking from Clogan's jars. Now and again, though not often, Elisha Thomas joined the other men. Everyone knew about how Elisha's son had killed himself, and some said it was because of his Ma, and some said it had to do with a traveling preacher, and others said it was because of a girl over in Taylor County. Ma said she felt sorry for Elisha Thomas, but she didn't like him, or Clogan either one, but especially not Clogan. She said Clogan was white trash, and Tom thought so too. Then one day Cutter found out from his Uncle Clark that Clogan had been talking to Captain Conner about matters he ought better to have kept to himself. After that it was all over.
Ma woke up the children very late one night. The rickety wagon was already loaded. Frank was up in front looking down at Tom as he came outside with the little ones. Frank shook his head, looking bossy, but Tom yawned, ignoring him. It was late in the summer and quite pleasant out, but Tom and the others were very sleepy. It was a small wagon and they had to leave most of their things behind. That included the pony, only the children didn't discover this until the next day.
Ma didn't want to go. She was heavy with child again. But Cutter insisted they had no choice. She kept her lips pressed shut tightly and didn't say anything for two whole days.
Tom thought Cutter too seemed nervous and angry when he climbed up into the wagon next to Frank. He was shushing the children to keep very quiet unless they wanted the switch. Then he clucked up the two horses, which reluctantly began to pull the overloaded wagon out from the little farmhouse shack.
No one looked back.

Memphis Blues Again: Book I, Chapter 3.

Passing outside the car around him was the Missouri countryside that was so familiar from his last visit: the round yellow hay bale wheels on their sides out in the open, mowed grassy fields, and the ubiquitous bare-branched trees preparing to wake up from winter. They looked exactly like bony, ashy, brown-black hands reaching up out of the cold ground. It was familiar and welcoming, this winding rural road. Extraordinary to be here again with no cheerless thoughts from home cluttering his mind.
Minutes passed, slipping away. Ten. Twenty. Out in the country. The road bent left along wide open golden-brown stubble fields, and then right again. Then he saw the massive pale blue steel of the bridge looming ahead, humping up over the water. He rolled forward through its tresses. Below were the shimmering ripples of the wide, brown river now close at hand. Then he was in Kansas.
Fort Leavenworth was off to his right a short distance ahead. Funny to think that Joe Johnston and JEB Stuart had been here, out in the western half of the continent. They were such prototypical Easterners. Virginia boys. It was hard to think of them out of their element, Johnston with his domed head over sharp eyes and a sharp, pointed beard, and Stuart's eyes twinkling mischievously and his silky, curly pirate's beard. Only maybe Stuart didn't affect the beard yet in his Kansas days. But they were here, loyal citizens serving their country in the decade before the unpleasantness. Johnston had spent time at Jefferson Barracks, too. Later, when Lee sent him creeping forward to the dingy old Harpers Ferry shed under a white flag bearing an ultimatum, JEB Stuart placed old John Brown right away, recognizing him from his time out here. A reconnaissance mission it was, spying out the ground before the assault. Don't mess with the Marines. Well, a lot of those men were familiar with the West; they'd come through on the way to Mexico and back. JEB Stuart met his bride in Kansas, too. Maybe they walked along these streets. Veni, Vidi, Victus sum he claimed, and it was true, at least for a while. Even McClellan was at Leavenworth. Little Mac, strutting about full of himself. How'd McClellan ever manage to compress so much ego within a single puffed out peacock body? An entire lifetime utterly blind to his own limitations. Fantastic. Even saintly Lee himself was nearby, stationed unhappily down in Texas. History adheres to and trails behind some of these people like gray muck on a wagon wheel. Still, to walk in the footsteps of Stuart and Johnston and McClellan in Leavenworth. No Easterner would believe you.
Fort Leavenworth was not Max's destination. He turned left at the first light and headed south in parallel to the river, among the tree-lined lanes.
He sensed other celebrity ghosts out there, reaching for him. Did any locals in town remember them now?
The foliage had been thinner in the closing years of the 1850s than it was now, small patches of shade over dirt roads where those famous foster brothers once strolled, Bill Sherman and Thomas Ewing, Jr, and Hugh. They were foster brothers and brothers-in-law, because Cump married his foster-sister.
But cousins used to marry all the time, Max thought. Take Joe. After his parents died, Old Joe was raised by his cousin, Charlotte Garner, and she herself had married Old Joe's own half-brother, Ben. Confusing. Close-knit roots, that's one way of putting it. But. . . .times and traditions.
Now that had been a branch of the real Ewing clan. Thomas Ewing, Jr was the original item, not who shot JR. It was odd how their names were mostly forgotten now, because once they had been so very powerful. Kingmaker-types. Thomas Jr played a pivotal role in Missouri history on more than one occasion. In the right place at the right time, and controversy be damned. And in Washington, after the war, too. He must have had unshakable faith in the law to do what he did, Max thought, defending some of the accused conspirators in the death of a friend. His eyes were darkly hooded and forward-looking. One look at him and it was clear he would make something of himself. He would go far. Their law office had been located near here, Max knew, on the very street where he now drove. It was no glassy Dallas skyscraper. Their offices were on the second of two storeys, a high-rise for its time. The private Ewing home, too, was tucked back in nearby, a block or two toward the river.
Worlds without end open up and open up continuously before our weary feet, Max thought. The paths we tread were cut out of the wilderness by the hard labor of a thousands and thousands of slaves since time immemorial. They're the unsung and forgotten ones who truly wrought civilization. And Sherman walked these streets. Think of that. A shabby, middle-aged, red-haired man soon to take a teaching position in Louisiana.
But Max didn't slow down. He drove all the way to the cemetery.

Memphis Blues Again: Book I, Chapter 2.

Nod off. Nod away.
Fall down gently like autumn's first lightly settling snowflakes into sleep, sleepy sleep. Forgetful sleep. Slip into effortless, unintended slumber. Float away.
Forget.
Did he simply forget it, the young boy wondered. He couldn't remember what Ma described. Maybe memories could evaporate like a puddle after several days in the hot sunlight. He thought he ought to remember, and it bothered him that he couldn't.
Outside the tiny, rude shack that was their home the late afternoon was beginning to tip over toward evening. Ma had gone with the bucket to fetch water for the string beans, leaving Tom with Mary, who next month would be four years old. Tom was the oldest; he'd turned seven in January.
Cutter was out in the fields somewhere. It was spring and the evenings were still pleasant, although soon the nights would be growing cooler and then cold.
Mary and he were under the table. She had a little brown doll that Ma had stitched together out of cloth. The doll was full of rice grains, but there was not enough rice, because Mary could easily squeeze all of it out of an arm or leg that then hung limp and withered. Tom was idly watching her play. His mind felt lazy and dreamy.
Over in another corner Frank sat on the floor doing nothing, his back to them. Tom looked at him. He must be cold, Tom thought, because he was by the fireplace, and the cool air came down the chimney there. Frank was six years old, but he was bigger than Tom. Bigger and meaner.
Hiram, who was just two years old, was asleep in the crib.
Frank had also been listening to Ma's kinfolk tales, smirking into the shadows, Tom knew. Frank was always my special Christmas present. But Frank was bad. Tom didn't like him. Frank was always poking at Tom and Mary, or pushing them down when no one was around to see. Tom always tried to protect Mary from him.
He thought about Ma's story. What puzzled Tom was that he could recall other glimpses of his Missouri days, but not something so important that he ought to remember it. Little lingering flashes of his dirt-smeared boyhood companions and their hearty pioneer deer hunter play came back to him now, and savage Indian clashes and tumbles. They'd blazed trees through the nearby woods like Daniel Boone. They'd startled up sudden secretive flocks of prairie chickens and collected their eggs, careful always of the snakes that also wanted the eggs. No need to tell their Mas about the snakes, because they'd just worry, and then the kids would have to stay closer to home. Sometimes in the evenings they would see deer in little clearings in the trees, and one time they saw five or six Indians moving silently toward the setting sun. The golden summer sun on the high plains and the rosy sunsets, those he recalled, and the low roll of hills so that whenever the wagon came up to the top of one there was always another wide, shallow depression before you with yet another hill or ridge mounting up at the horizon beyond in the frozen knee-deep waves of lapping earth. He remembered infrequent, crude farmhouses carved out of the wilderness, not so different from this one where they lived now. Wispy white clouds looking impossibly near to hand. . . .
Then he thought of grim Isaiah Cutter out in the fields. Why grim? Because he was always grim, like some dismal thing had happened to him once upon a time and he could never escape the consequences that unfolded forever and ever after. It was all very hard to understand. Cutter always smelled like sweat and dirt. His face was sunburnt, and he had dirt on his neck and under his cracked yellow fingernails. His dark hair was always spiky, his beard rough and uneven, his cheeks sunken, and his hazel eyes hollow. He always made Tom think of a dangerous animal in a cage that would watch you closely because it was always looking for a way out. At mealtimes Cutter scarcely said a word to Ma or the children. Sometimes like today when Cutter was still off in the fields, or when he was away talking to Clogan, Ma would talk to them about when she was a girl in Tennessee, and then she would always end by telling them about Missouri. She would talk about her friend, the other Nancy, and then finally about how her two little angels, Tom and Mary, had been dressed up in their nice new clothes even though they were barefoot in the soft grass.
"Were Uncle Ezra and Aunt Louisa there?" Tom had asked today.
"Oh no, they were not there."
Just then she came back inside through the heavy blanket on the door and carried the bucket over to the table. He could hear it sloshing when she banged it down and the heaviness of her breathing. She should have sent Frank for the water, he thought. She didn't need to be doing that.
"Francis, can you get a fire going," she said in a minute once her breath had returned. She was sitting in one of the rickety chairs at the table. Mary had scooted around and was marching her baby doll over and over again across Ma's feet, saying: "Da da da da da." Ma didn't care.
Tom looked across the room. The other boy didn't move where he sat with his back to them. Ma had to ask him two more times before he sighed and got up to do as he was told.
Tom was trying hard to remember. He recalled the shady, ribbony river-stream curling down out of the north in a wide swale. From a distance it had looked like a river of trees running down across the prairie.
"Ma, remember one time," Tom said, "when it rained so much the hills poked up like islands from all the water?"
"I remember," she replied. "That was a couple years ago. All those poor animals trapped with us. But that flood was nothing compared to forty-nine."
Under the table he pictured the miles-wide silvery flat inundation, just the crowns of some of the trees sticking out. They couldn't go anywhere until the water went away. "Better keep an eye out for Noahy's ark," Uncle Ezra had said to him with a wink. Tom remembered that. Uncle Ezra wasn't Tom's uncle, but Ma's uncle, her only kinfolk who had also come from Tennessee, not counting the Shumers. He remembered the animals trapped up on the hills with the people, the cows and sheep, and even rabbits and deer.
Up on the table top he could hear Ma with a knife now chopping the beans. Frank was blowing on the coals.
"Ma," Tom said.
"Yes, Thomas?"
"Do people eat feathers?"
At the fireplace Frank grunted.
"Do people eat feathers?" Ma said. "Why would you say such a thing?"
"Because of that song. Yankee Doodle stuck a feather in his hat and it was macaroni. And you said macaroni was something the Aye-talians eat."
She laughed.
"It's just a song, Thomas. It don't mean nothing."
"Oh."
He watched Mary playing with her doll for a few more minutes. The house was quiet except for Frank blowing on the coals. Tom pressed on his eyes, hard. It was something he had learned how to do a long time ago before they came to Iowa. Directly he could see, emerging out of the blackness, the usual myriad of squares, golden squares, brown-tan like toasted bread, brightly glowing squares varying in size. Interspersed among them at regular intervals were patches of perfect blackness. Square black holes that were only an absence in the shimmering goldness. If someone could make a drawing of that, he thought, what a strange picture that would be. Except that the squares changed, swelling and contracting. They turned and twisted. They moved. You couldn't draw moving things. Nobody could. Why not?
He heard Frank moving around, and he moved his thumbs from his eyes. At first he could see nothing, but then his vision cleared. He saw Frank had got a little fire going. Frank stood up and without looking back he hurried out the door, the blanket chuffing down behind him. Ma called after him but he kept going. Ma didn't go after him.
Tom remembered one summer afternoon in Missouri when the sky grew swiftly dark purple, and the hail came so cold and hard and dreadful, but it was short-lived, stopping suddenly. The sky menaced a sickly mustard green color that felt so cold and close and dangerous. Ma was scared, and they ran ran ran to Aunt Louisa's and Uncle Ezra's house. It seemed such a long way to run. Ma was in her long skirt clutching very tightly baby Hiram wrapped against the cold and pleading with him to keep up, please hurry, please run faster. Faster, Tom! Because she hadn't been able to find the pony. And where was little Mary? Already at the Scott farmhouse. And where was Cutter? Away in Maryville doing nobody any good. And how tiring it was to run so far, and exciting in the darkness when they all hurried into the root cellar. Then gravely-voiced Uncle Ezra said hush up hush up be quiet, him peering up through the gap at the top of the door. In the sallow light Tom had seen Uncle Ezra's stretched scrawny turkey neck and his fearful bulging blue eyes like a bird's eggs watching urgently until it was all over.
Ma finished her chopping and Tom heard her sweeping the beans into the bucket, and the splashing in the water. "I hope that boy's gone to find Isaiah," Ma said as she got up to her feet. "Dinner will be ready soon."
From where he was under the table, Tom watched her come around, carrying the bucket with both hands. It was heavy for her because she was so big with the new baby. In another month, maybe, she said he would have another brother or sister.
She managed to hang the bucket on the hook above the flames. She pushed back her hair and then came back to her chair, falling down into it. He could tell how tired she was.
He frowned, thinking of the end of Ma's story. He tried to imagine it, to see whether the pictures that came from her singsongy voice into his mind matched up with any true memory, but they did not. He was afraid that if he imagined it too well it might become a counterfeit memory that afterwards he would think was true. He often grew sleepy from Ma's baby-cooing when she told them those stories, imagining the green grass and a tall, funny-looking man in a big black coat standing under a shingle oak tree with a Bible. He thought for some reason that the funny man must have a splotchy red face. Little Mary he imagined was there next to him, and he was holding her hand. But where was baby Hiram? And where was Frank? He didn't know. Ma never mentioned them.
All the things he could recall, but no trace of memory remained of the most important event of them all. Had it rotted out somehow or dissolved away from his mind?
Try as he might, Tom never could remember Ma's wedding.

Memphis Blues Again: Book I, Chapter 1.

Atrocious red outhouses are whimsical mistakes.
That one thought, a single fragmentary notion, seemed to flare up with internal phosphorescence, as if in the wake of a boat on a darkly seething subconscious nighttime sea. It dangled there for a fleeting instant in his sentient awareness, briefly elevated by chance and shorn of context before, firefly-quick, it lost itself again among the frenzied, undifferentiated throng of ideas sequestered in the depths below.
Mnemonic devices for review, Max Bainbridge thought. Whatever it takes. Practice makes perfect.
He sat perfectly still with an unreadable face, leaning slightly to his right so he could better gaze through the scratchy port. The plane had leveled out. He felt the slowing as flaps grabbed invisible air.
His jumbled and crowded mind was reverberant, making instantaneous cross-connections. It was like, he thought, a vortex of bats fluffing hundreds upon hundreds of whispery thin, leathery wings beyond the yawning mouth of a murky cave. Facts and ideas, approximations, themes, calculations, estimations, conceptual aggregations, opinions and proofs, all of it whirring and riffling continuously behind his eyes. Always trying obsessively to assimilate. . . .everything. Produce a unified, consistent whole.
He glanced over as the stewardess in her navy blue vest passed forward down the aisle, hands touching the backs of each seat, casting glimpses left and right. Perfectly manicured nails painted flat red-brown. The color of old blood. Tall, in her mid-forties, with curled and pressed blonde hair. Facelift? he wondered. Checking seatbelts and trays.
He turned back to the window, reflecting on the bulk of the stray items he'd learned, as yet untabulated, particulars, misconceptions, intellectual constructions. A figment, a fragment, wonder where the money went. Specifics and generalizations, frank guesswork. Picturing all these threads weaving together and fraying apart in continuous psychic ferment. How to explain it to anyone? To put it into words was a challenge.
Words. Convenient handles for elusive concepts. Language functions as a kind of filter that safeguards us from direct experience, he thought. A barrier we can't help imposing. When we can describe a thing in words we can no longer see it for what it is. The world's reduced to whatever we desire it to be. That's why we're creatures of unreasonable expectancy. Reality never lives up to our expectations.
The captain's detached, equanimous voice filled the cabin. Preparing for our final descent. Estimated time of arrival. Thank you for flying.
Ultimately the words we use lock us all together into interactive systems of social expectation that's accepted as sensible and necessary. Sanity by acclamation, by mob resolve. Because the mob believes and embraces the words, not the objects that the words once represented. Words sever us from reality as birth separates us from continuity with our biological heritage. It's a pinching off process that isolates soul-sized blobs of free-floating consciousness in a hostile universe, tossing defenseless Hansels and Gretels into the deep dark woods with hungry witches all around, wolves howling, white birds pecking up their bread crumbs. Consummate isolation.
Above him the air conditioning hissed away, forgotten. Those around him were now clearing their throats, and conversation was beginning to taper off, just as it always did during this part of a flight. Following an unwritten script. A behavior of quiet expectancy setting in.
That's why we so desperately reach out for the other, for empathy. Sharing. That's the loneliness which we strive desperately to rectify, but we never fully succeed. Telltale signs of bellybutton scars remain, mumble-whispering the taboo mystery of embryonic growth, little kidney bean fetus within mother's womb. The physical proof that connects all human beings though we be apart. One thing one organism we are, no matter the sentimental stories from birth to death of single individuals. Like a semiautonomous colonial reef of coral, building and extending down the centuries.
Through the sun's changing glare he regarded a patchwork of open farm fields and brown, chocolaty-muddy river bends. It looked sunny and warm out there. Not at all like the white-on-white snowfields surrounding Denver. In Colorado the snow had obliterated any sign of the Chatfield Reservoir, an impounding of the South Platte. His first chance of glimpsing the Mississippi waterways on this trip had been scotched, but here was the Missouri. Big Muddy.
The Platte enters the Missouri above the Iowa border. And the Little Platte on the opposite bank, not far from the airport.
The plane banked and dropped lower over the Kansas City plains in a small fluster of turbulence.
Almost there. Almost there.
Jayhawkers and bushwhackers had once duked it out around these low hills, trafficking back and forth below the eastern bend in the river. The Missouri imposed no further barrier there.
The river deflected bushwhacker traffic to the south, he thought. Landscape features channel water, and history, too.
The thinner Kansas River puckered its lips here, a tributary kissing the grander, wilder ribbon just a few miles from the heart of the old city. Twelfth and Vine.
Words shackle us, distort our understanding, if we believe them without examining their hidden assumptions. Influence our behavior. Guiding violent men across the Kansas-Missouri border, sneaking, quiet, quiet. Down dark violet starry desolate canyons frosted in creamy low moonlight. Quantrill's men, or Lane's counter-raiders. Or like now, on the Mexico border. Coyotes, or packing mules. Swallowing balloons or thin-membrane condoms. Never venture out without your raincoat, Don advised a long time ago. Sage advice.
I could tell Carroll about Jim Lane and the jayhawkers, but he could only tell me how the Jayhawks became Big Twelve champions and NCAA top seed.
They were still taxiing on the Denver tarmac when Max had felt the first irrefutable sign: the distinctive painful irritation in his throat. He'd recognized it immediately.
Common cold.
His body teemed with stowaways, clandestine virus particles that were suddenly bursting forth, punching their way through endothelial membranes. The painful burning steady during the second leg of the flight. Made him thirsty. The inflammatory response was underway. Mortar rounds of interferon and histamine exchanged, thrust, counterthrust, parry, riposte. Attackers and defenders. Escalation.
Not so different from the struggle for Kansas. Slave state or free? Sentiments stirred up by wealthy firebrands, pro-slavery Missourians rushing across the border to throw the vote. Atchison. Invasion of Kansas Territory by both Missourians and New England abolitionists sponsored by the Emigrant Aid Society. Opposing combatants pouring troops into the peaceful green and yellow interior where the buffalo roam. Racing headlong into bloodthirsty confrontation.
Now boiled down to a few trite, lifeless sentences consigned to dull high school history books, once it had been a matter of dazzling light and heat.
I'll bet Jerusalem John could tell a tale if only he were here. Set the record straight. Imagine him on a plane. But instead ‑‑ only mild puffs of dust from a graveyard past. Just look around you. See any lingering repercussions? Not unless you've learned how to open your eyes. Memorizing names and dates long enough for final exams. Over a million died, swamping previous records. An historic discontinuity that reduced the status of preceding chronicles to a kind of feeble, quaint fantasy. But search out the darkness of your mind or soul. World War II spit out the bones of sixty or seventy million ‑‑ six times as many Jews alone as the rupture between North and South ‑‑ and who dwells on that? Nothing to be done about it so just forget. Ledgers stuffed with pages and pages of horrific spreadsheets that make the Civil War seem a sweet, sentimental melody. And all those spindly white limbs stacked in high piles. Soiled stripped flannels with greasy stains. Bergen-Belsen. Ohrdruf. Dachau cattle cars. Or Greek fire poured out of the sky over Nagasaki and Hiroshima. But history always swallows its own tail, doesn't it. Tale. The decades grow grainy and blur and fade out. Out with the old, in with the new, bring me a beer, it's time for the game. Feeble human memory be the death of us all.
Down out of the sky came the plane, and soon his feet were on solid ground. The predictable noises and motion of airport terminals engulfed him. Distances grew closer, more real and immediate. He thoughts narrowed accordingly, turning to baggage carousels and rotating green lights and escalators and exits. Overhead security announcements broadcast. Do not leave your luggage unattended. People streaming all around, a river of humanity sloshing in both directions.
Like partisans near Westport. Bidirectional flow.
It was unexpectedly chilly when he went outside to catch the shuttle. The warm, sunny panorama as seen from the air had deceived him. He was glad he'd worn his jacket and a hat on the plane.
In less than an hour he'd picked up the rental. In the parking lot Max hooked up the GPS and then headed north. With happiness he felt the velocity of forward progression.
On the way!
A few smatterings of icy snow still filled in the shadows of the low roadside hillocks. No snow had been visible from the air. Hadn't he left all that in the Rockies? The patches would be gone within a day, he supposed.
He was here. Here! It was almost beyond belief. He squeezed the steering wheel.
All his urgent planning of the last few weeks was finally giving way to the adrenalin of the road. The past had become the present. Now time could be neither wasted nor rushed.
It had come together so rapidly, demanding utmost care. Years of abstract imaginings were beginning to come to life before his eyes. To see the topography, the very lay of the land. Land of heroes and martyrs and dreams. The passing minutes did not dribble away the way they usually did but were coherent and clear. He was completely aware of moving through time and place, trying to match it to an internal map. He wanted to memorize every detail sliding by outside the car. Could he? He could try.
He passed through Platte City. It little resembled the Platte City of his imagination. A different world from the mid-1800s. But he had no time for Platte City. He crossed the bridge over a little river. What was. . . ? The Little Platte, of course, he realized. Upstream on this river, five miles outside of St Joseph, a train had derailed. . . .But that was for later.
He turned left.
Here!