Folklorist Alan Lomax spent his career documenting folk music traditions from around the world. Now thousands of the songs and interviews he recorded are available for free online, many for the first time. It's part of what Lomax envisioned for the collection — long before the age of the Internet.
Lomax recorded a staggering amount of folk music. He worked from the 1930s to the '90s, and traveled from the Deep South to the mountains of West Virginia, all the way to Europe, the Caribbean and Asia. When it came time to bring all of those hours of sound into the digital era, the people in charge of the Lomax archive weren't quite sure how to tackle the problem.
"We err on the side of doing the maximum amount possible," says Don Fleming, executive director of the Association for Cultural Equity, the nonprofit organization Lomax founded in New York in the '80s. Fleming and a small staff made up mostly of volunteers have digitized and posted some 17,000 sound recordings.
In the fourth verse, we are again stranded in time as the images showcase Southern traditions, some noble, some dubious. The refinement and gentility of the well-dressed young couple is undercut by the illegal whiskey they’re drinking. We also rocket back in time to see the degradation of prisoners in a chain gang, but when Dylan follows that up with “I can hear them rebels yell,” it conjures the battle cry of Confederate soldiers that struck fear into their Northern enemies.
Lee said, "I don't think anyone could name anyone who could have done a better job than Jefferson Davis did, and I personally don't know of anyone who could have done as good as job." That's from Robert E. Lee, which is pretty good authority.
Anti-genre. Anti-action-adventure. Anti-crime. Anti-detective. Anti-fantasy. Anti-horror. Anti-mystery. Anti-romance. Anti-science fiction. Anti-western. Anti-inspirational. Anti-categorical ghettoization of literature. Anti-escapism. Anti-literary. Anti-anti-intellectualism. Anti-conservative. I advocate exposing truth via the medium of fiction.
Whether you find Tom Stoppard’s “Travesties” a delightfully entertaining exercise of intellect or simply a tedious bore will depend upon how much you know about James Joyce, Lenin and the art movement called Dadaism. At a recent performance of the production, now on stage at the McCarter Theatre Center in Princeton, at least a quarter of the audience slipped out at intermission. On the other hand, those who stayed for the second act, seemed to be having a rollicking good time.
“Travesties” is probably a little too clever for its own good. Stuffed with wordplay, puns and references, it’s inter-textual to the extreme, like an enormous in-joke for graduate students.
Some hours earlier, dashing into the library to escape the rain, she had promptly forgotten herself among the warm, friendly stacks. It was one of her favorite places, and it was not the first time that she'd accidentally lost hours there. Now, emerging from the west door and into the tail end of the afternoon, with the straps of her big orange bag with its embroidered long-necked cats slung up over her shoulder, Tormy found that the rain had stopped, but the wind was gusty. The lane of sky that was visible up above the red brick laboratory building opposite remained overcast and mildly menacing. Would it rain more? She judged it might, but not immediately. The umbrella could remain in the bag. She turned left and her long stride carried her swiftly along her way.Not too many representatives of the student body were out and about on campus. The peaceful quiet of a late Friday afternoon had set in. Friday afternoons were always pleasant on campus. Most classes had ended hours before, and the students were already home, decompressing from the week and preparing for the night ahead.As she walked she remembered:
I been Roy Bittaned and Edward WittenedUndercooked and overbookedGastrogavaged the sour whey and curds ofAssorted untranscendent astonishmentsAnd there's no dirty words, justSalesmen with unrepentant consciences
It was a fragment of something of Charlie's that she'd read that morning before leaving home, in part a parody of "A Simple Desultory Philippic." No, not a parody, because it was more gently respectful than that. How then should she think of it? A kindly-sweet temporally-shifted paean. She knew who Bittan was because of her father ‑‑ she could hear the band introduction in her head: "Professor Roy Bittan!" ‑‑ but she'd had to look up Witten. Leave it to Charlie to throw the two into a wry, juxtaposed parallelism like that. Perniciously antithetical.Dramatizes the conflict between.Ah, she was succumbing to the conditioning, she thought, reflexively weighing text for hidden meanings and structural architecture. Adhere strictly to the recipe, down to the very last crumb. She contemplated the torturous agony of vivisection. From too much reliance on clinical definitions comes only death.She came down the red brick walkway under the chessboard matrix of the library's illuminated windows glowing pallid amber and turned left again along the low stone wall. Her bright, wide-spaced green eyes took everything in. Shaggy, dirty blonde hair fell in wavy puppy dog tatters over her shoulders, framing her pixie features. Her path brought her beneath soaring sheets of marble, she supposed it to be, still streaked from the earlier rain. Four storeys high, five? Lacking the drama of the northern façade, the rear of the library was flat and featureless, but somber-silent, encasing a majestic repository of accumulated knowledge. All that unspoken strength whose brooding power awaited just the right supplicant like a sword in a stone. Only the initiated could fully sense or appreciate the intellectual juggernaut lying latent and patient behind those walls.She was thankful that the building temporarily blocked the wind, but the zephyrs came licking round at her again at the far corner. She crossed the street and then jagged around the angle of the hedge. On the right the Morehead Clock Tower sprang up stiffly. Ridiculously phallic, it might as well be an Atlas rocket jabbing up against the overcast sky. Like a perilously sharp pencil point, its conic glans was elevated by a circle of white columns in echo of the Old Well. The gallant, exalted organ and the musky plunging well shaft. The carillon commenced its ring-a-ting trilling on the hour as she was passing by. Hark the sound! The more head missile.
Wave willows, murmur waters,Golden sunbeams, smile!Earthly music cannot wakenLovely Annie Lisle.
The most famous least known tune in the nation.A strong gust shook through the pine tops around her. It had not been so blustery earlier in the day. She was grateful there had been no rain then because she'd been able to have her lunch in the arboretum. The chapel crenellations were visible there from her bench between the trees. The chapel was one of her favorite places too, although she thought how it was funny that she had never gone inside. One day she must. She was eating her lunch under her favorite old cypress tree and casually scanning through The Daily Tar Ball. Now, as she walked along Stadium Drive in the early evening, she recalled the sad story about the poor Smith boy. So tragic, and the story never seemed to stop, even though it was half a year since the cops had shot him down. The story was one of those enigmas whose answer would never be recorded for posterity. A minor, sad cul-de-sac in a narrow corner of history, end of file. A confused kid, a lot of beer, a high-speed chase, and gunfire in the night. A perverse, sudden truncation to a promising life. But they needed something to put in the paper, and they dug, and they dug, and they dug. Today they were making gossipy allegations against the Assistant Dean of Students. She had talked with him that night. She had not talked with him that night. Or she had, but not by phone. It wasn't a story so much as blowing on dying embers to see whether something interesting might flare up. Just a lot of rustling whispers. That was no way to write. Make a blunt accusation or leave the woman alone.
Undercooked and overbookedGastrogavaged the sour whey and curds
Gastrogavaged. Leave it to him to disinter such a word. Gastro of course was stomach, but gavage?Straightaway she'd blipped over to Douglas Harper's site, and what do you know, there it was: "from Fr. gavage, from gaver 'to stuff' (17c.; see gavotte)." Good old dependable Harper; gotta love him. And gavotte? Fascinating references to a lively dance from the late seventeenth century, but also to gluttony: "to stuff, force-feed poultry."Force-fed the sour whey and curds. Yep. Telepathic Charlie might have written it with this very incident in mind. Newspapers cracking soaked and spattered with the insides of damaged lives. Human softness. Fragile. Handle with care. Sure to sell.She was not fond of this part of the walk where the road flared out to accommodate parking like an SUV-packed aneurysm, brandishing back crabwise into the trees. It was unseemly, unethical, immoral, displacing the native forest in favor of environment-murdering internal combustors. And the CHT with its free fares. Where else in the land of the almighty dollar did you find such a deal? The land of milk and honey. But she was a hypocrite. She'd driven to school that morning herself, up to Spencer Hall, all the way from Purefoy Road. How far? Two miles? She'd already walked about half that distance today, and she'd have to retrace her steps later tonight to return to her car to drive home. So easy to scorn the collective, faceless others while protectively preserving an unexamined self-righteous self-image. Ridiculous conceit.How do you force-feed poultry, she wondered, and why. It reminded her suddenly of when, as kids, her father used to take them to the Cape Fear Fair and Expo. Later, she must have been a junior or senior in high school ‑‑ a junior, she thought ‑‑ she had gone into the poultry barn with some of her friends, just looking around, messing around. It was a great big shed with a corrugated zinc roof, airy, but smelling of chicken shit, with the farmers or farmer-wannabes in their blue and golden jackets, and the lanes between the pens watered down and raked and slightly muddy at the edges with yellow straw everywhere, and the roosters crowing, little beggar tin cups of feed in their cages, and the many breeds of rabbits in their cages, too. They had found by accident the rooster that belonged to Robert Corrigan, a boy from school, and an enormous purple ribbon attached to the cage. Inside, the bird was enormous and really rather beautiful, she'd had to admit, quite plump with gorgeous golden-yellow plumage and a wise, if fierce, old face with bright orange, otherworldly eyes and a thick, fleshy red comb and wattles under his horny yellow-brown beak. Great spurs sprouted from his legs. She was bent low to look in the cage and he was watching her closely, puffing himself up even bigger, pacing back and forth in the small space, pushing his breast up against the pen, challenging her to a duel. Then her friends started giggling and she looked up wondering what it was, and one of them pointed to the ribbon and she read what it said. Best Cock in Show. Always after that they remembered the year that Robert Corrigan had won the Best Cock award. It was more funny because whenever any of them asked him about it he always said it was for Best Rooster in Show. Besides, Robert Corrigan was a short boy with pipe cleaner thin arms. Now that she thought about it, she considered that maybe he'd been born with insufficient muscle stem cells in his arms or something. But his legs were good enough because she remembered she had seen him running track and he was actually pretty fast. But books and covers and the judgments associated therewith. Shortcomings in one area often led to compensatory and hyperbolic embellishments elsewhere. Robert Corrigan had married that plain Jane Jordan Brooks girl right after high school, and they now had two or three little babies of their own. Maybe there was more to the Best Cock award than her friends and she had supposed at the time. You never could tell.Now that she looked closer, she saw there weren't very many cars parked on Stadium Drive this afternoon. Everyone gone home. She angled across the parking lot with the stadium off to her right, crossed downhill between the array of enormous floodlights high on a pole and the alumni building.What had been the sequence of events in the last hour or so, she wondered, the decisive and climactic chain of cause and effect culminating in his final moments standing, lightly swaying, drunk by the side of the road early one summer morning? The way you asked the question betrayed human assumptions about time and reality. The auxiliary verbs imposing tense. Had been. Were. Is. To be. Hamlet pinned forever onto a mounting board for public inspection and consideration from all possible angles. Submitted for your approval. Hamlet never died, did he. Works of literature sustain life; they are vital; they continue to exist; not were, they are, eternally, amen. And every life is a poem, a breath. In the dark shadows of unseen trees blotting out the explosion of the universe in the unending silence overhead, extending for uncounted lightyears, eternity beckons, hushed animals in the woods startled by the Forerunner rumbly-rattling off the road, gravel popping, lurching to a sudden precipitous stop, end of useless velocity, the piercing cry of dual sirens in unmelodious harmony, your ancestors watching on, holding their breath. Moments become momentous. He could not have suspected that the last twinkling points of his life were rushing straight at him; but then, neither could the policemen who had been racing through the night, patrol car lights reeling brightly, have known what kind of fateful consequences awaited them, either. Because they must live with those unfortunate memories. It was the elusive, unknowable causal connections that everyone wanted to understand. To reconstruct vaporized minutes as if that collision of disparate human experiences could be reduced to the punched holes in a scroll of instructions for a player piano. Cause and effect, as if half-asleep human beings populated a universe of Newtonian billiard balls. Clockwork. Entropy: things fall apart. But that was just an empirical perspective, not a physical law. A way to grasp the mundane, to comply with our expectations, this messier state must come sequentially after that tidier one, strictly phenomenally observational, trying to make sense of the arrow of time experienced by human observers. Create bins of past and present and future, and distant past, and distant future, pick up the rubble and neatly file everything accordingly. Once upon a time begat conflict begat resolution begat happily ever after. But the laws of physics could not distinguish between forward and reverse directions through time. The arrow of time was only a trick of the limits of human perception. Human experience, the totality, might well comprise an extended manifold through all time and space. The distant past no less immediate than right now, she, walking down this sidewalk. Step. Step. Step. Maybe a young Cherokee girl superimposed in exactly the same space moving softly through an unbroken forest long before any white men had come to disrupt this continent and its timeless natural cycles. Her heart then softly pounding, just like her own did now, both beating, superimposed in space, separated only by six or seven hundred years. God blinks, a thousand years fall away like stardust between galaxies. And so in that sense no one ever really dies, and nothing ends. Ah, but this deep-rooted desire to carve up events into distinctly granular causal significance, that was so human a trait. And embedded deeply, firmly in the present. Tells you much more about human beings than it does about the nature of time.And that was what she found objectionable about the university, too. Studying poetry. As if. A poem was alive. She believed that. If not, then it had no point. And so an explication, the way the professors meant, was no different than vivisection. No poet wrote with any hope or expectation that his or her work would be perversely sliced open like that, its guts exposed and steaming in the classroom. She smiled, imagining Whitman imagining stuffed shirts trying to rip his words to shreds. Professors of literature ought to know better. Well, she was sure they did know better, or many of them, anyway. But how to make money out of it? It was a shadow world, or a dim reflection. A sideline too easily mistaken for the real thing. The literary academic game. She could play games too.
Salesmen with unrepentant consciences
She crossed the bridge to the grassy green roof of the parking deck, packets of breezy gusts pursuing her into the clearing to renew their bursting assault at her back. The lamps around her were flickering to life. A few people came and went at the intersection. Late prowlers like herself. Stop for a coffee? No. She kept left to pass by the rec center and over the far bridge through the trees. Briefly she glimpsed the fat, squat water tower in the distance against the cloudy twilight, like a white mother ship descending to impose universal peace and harmony or to destroy the wicked denizens of Earth. Or, perhaps, to serve man. So silly, that, she thought: as if translations from one language to another retained accidental homonymous meanings. To serve. It's a cookbook! The water tower bore certain structural similarities to the Old Well too, she suddenly realized. Subliminal thematic replications and variations dipped and weaved all through life with fractal dependability. A weird winding staircase dangling underneath the globose lower curve of the tank like a perspective-deforming Escher sketch. Red Escher-sketch with two little dials? Hmm. She surreptitiously eyed two shirtless boys who were shooting hoops under the up-thrust warrens of a great termite den of a dorm. The twanging, thuddy sound of the rubber and the backboard and the breaking squeak of sneakers. Flailing naked arms and rapid staccato dribbling. She continued on to the open plaza and moments later entered by the second door. She went downstairs.The hallway was empty. Tormy let herself in with her key and flicked on the lights. She dropped her key ring on a desktop and the cat bag down in a chair and pulled up another one close by. No one else was around. Good. No witnesses. Couldn't leave any living witnesses, and she was generally opposed to unnecessary violence on principle. Settling down to business, she typed in her password, not unmindful that of course they could track her that way, but she thought it unlikely it would come to that. It was a subtle kind of subversion in which she was engaged, and by the time it was noticed it would be too late to hope for a faithful reconstruction of present events. Reaching down into the bag, she pulled out the notebook that held a hardcopy of the replacement document. Then she detached the flash drive from her key ring and plugged it into the front of the computer tower, turning her attention to the monitor.She located the original offending document on the server and double-clicked. The file opened up, and she scanned bits of it quickly, scrolling downward. A poetry explication is a short analysis. . . .How are the dramatized conflicts or themes. . . .We must focus on the poem's parts. . . .Look for certain patterns. . . .Present the large issues. . . .Do not write. . . .You can write. . . .Suggestions for improvement. . . .Despite her intimate familiarity with the mini-article, her nose wrinkled reflexively. Execrable opprobrium. This is the acceptable formula to follow in order to win public acclaim. Might as well instruct the malleable minds of witless youth in the way to look out at the world through their own eyeballs. How you are to constrain your unique, God-given voice. Binding mantras extolled by a self-styled writing resource center. It offended every sensibility she'd been a lifetime in developing and evolving. A lifetime's myriad experiences and hard lessons and nuanced apprehensions slamming dead on into a wall of pretentious commandments as handed down by prudent and sagacious potentates draped in predictable folds of sanctioned and sanctimonious tweed. No. She had a duty to art itself, or perhaps to the idea of art, to the very notion that these crippling instructions completely neglected. And certainly she had a duty to her own sense of identity. It was not to be endured.She had previously copied the virginal document directly from the server, preserving all its formatting intact. This cloned duplicate she had taken home and, working privately, she had painstakingly rewritten it as it ought to have been written the first time. Away with its contemptuous crushing assaults on intellectual liberty! One does not explicate a poem by systematically anatomizing it according to academia's rigid prescriptions. That path led only to mutilation. A poem was a living thing, breathing, and every word it contained directly and indirectly informed and sustained and influenced and charmed every other word; by pulling it apart you instantly severed those silky, delicate links; you did violence to language; you killed it. Poems were not understood in destructive dismemberment but by inhaling them, by taking them into one's own lungs and letting them infuse the bloodstream. To be carried throughout the reader's body, to interact with his or her own consciousness in a manner that was unique to every reader, so that every poem finally had as many meanings as the number of minds and hearts it encountered. That was the only way to know a poem, and to hope to touch the soul of the poet who had found it in the world and written it down. Such was the gist of her rewrite.She overwrote the original version on the server with her rectified adaptation. Now, anyone consulting the Writing Center for resources in the explication of poetry would have a new and liberating tool at his disposal. It was a small act in a wider revolution, perhaps, but she had done her part. Now there was only one more action to be taken.Unplugging the flash drive and snapping it back onto her key ring, she logged off the computer and returned the chairs to their earlier places. She opened the notebook and removed from it the printed version of the corrected text. On the other side of the main desk was a wall rack holding laminated versions of the various resources offered by the Writing Center for rapid consultation by walk-ins. She flipped through it and pulled the original, replacing it with the new and improved rendering. Then she tucked the original back into her notebook ‑‑ she'd destroy the evidence later away from the scene of the crime ‑‑ and, returning the notebook to the orange cat bag, she hoisted it back onto her shoulder, shut out the lights, and left the room, making sure the door was locked behind her.Nobody here but us chickens.Back outside it had begun to rain again. She swore softly, digging around in the bottom of her bag for her umbrella. The sun had finally set somewhere behind the clouds. Darkness would come on quickly, and she still had to walk all the way back to her car. Well, there was nothing to be done but to go. She started back up the brick walkway, the rain pattering on the bright pink vinyl over her head."No dirty words, just salesmen," she murmured aloud to herself. Then she thought: No dirty words. Hmm. Now that, really, is sort of an interesting idea. If you stop to think about it.
All the world outside the house had turned white for Angelina's twelfth birthday, and Sam's thirteenth.It was a dreamy vision all at once mild and noble and tame, a foot of glittering, fleecy white snow following along the smooth contours of the ground. Floating close overhead, the backlit sky glowed spectral and featureless with the diffused light of midday. A gentle but steady settling down of fresh snow occupied the narrow space in between Heaven and Earth. The soft world outside the window, white and mute, appeared to Joseph a magical and pure, new place, clean and cold, untrodden and untouched. It was an icy wonderland that stirred up sentimental notions of home and hearth and the incipient Yuletide season, not two weeks away.Every year they celebrated the birthdays on December tenth, because Angelina had been born on the ninth, and Sam on the eleventh.Partly muffled voices tottered out intermittently from the dining room, but only now and again did he bother to pay attention to what was being said. Now feminine laughter lifted in the other room, Walter's heavy baritone rising up accordingly to transiently puncture Joseph's solitude. He was telling some funny story about Indians visiting McGregor, chiefs named Black Dog and Little Crow, and with other names that no English tongue could pronounce. More laughter followed, but soon it quieted again and the conversation fell away.The sweet aroma of baking bread wafted throughout the house. Joseph breathed on the glass and watched it fog. He drew a small circle there and a pair of squiggles. Meaningless window doodles.It was cold sitting by the window, but he didn't mind. A fire crackled at the end of the parlor, but it was dying down. Soon he would have to go out to the shed to bring more wood inside.All bundled up early this morning, he had ventured out into the biting cold to feed the animals and break the ice on the trough. The horses stamped and whinnied when he came into the barn, steam blasting from their big, velvety nostrils. Only a few inches of icy snow had crusted the ground then, and the air had been brittle in his lungs. But now, safe inside from the shivery cold, the warmth of the house enfolded him in its nestling embrace.He raised his gaze. If the clouds were moving across the sky, he couldn't tell it. All was white and appeared motionless. All human activity seemed to have been postponed indefinitely. Everything had stopped, surely. Everyone everywhere must be suspended in the same spellbinding reverie.It's a trick, he thought. Serenity.The winter storm had only brought a temporary reprieve to the agitation that had been building for months in advance of the election. Now all that remained was this brief period of calm, and then. . . .What?"There won't be a war," Aunt Charlotte had declared many times when others had been enthusing in the growing excitement. This war-talk bothered her. "How could there be? No country can go to war with itself."In the other room their voices were relaxed enough today. The deceptive calm had overcome them, too. Aunt Charlotte, he knew, would be scurrying about with the teapot, nervously refilling cups, returning it to its hook, and fussing over the oven. Walter, her brother, was visiting from Prairie du Chien with his wife, Bessie. They had arrived the previous afternoon. Walter Garner seemed to move somewhat stiffly for his forty years, but maybe, Joseph thought, it wasn't because of his age but merely his formal manner. He wore a neatly trimmed black moustache and possessed dark, unblinking eyes that shone like polished obsidian, hinting at a deep-seated sense of wry humor. His wife, in contrast, seemed a featureless, prematurely old, gray doll. They were only the latest in a never-ending series of relatives and friends that Ben had arranged to have come stay at the house for a few days in his absence.That had been the best thing about the Panic, Joseph thought: it had kept Ben away for weeks at a time in Chicago, and in Columbus and Cleveland, and sometimes farther east in Boston and New York, trying to recover the family fortune. For a few years several of the houses in and around Volga City had been left abandoned, families forced out of their homes to somehow limp back up the Ohio River valley, all their holdings repossessed by the banks. That was the period when you heard about nothing other than grain prices and overextended railroad companies and the Ohio Life and Trust and hard and soft currencies and interest rates, most of which meant little enough to Joseph. He remembered the night that Ben had tried to explain to Aunt Charlotte what was happening. It had begun as a fight over a shopping trip she had made to Dubuque. She had kept turning her back on him, refusing to hear him scolding her for her spending habits. Finally Ben had grabbed her by the shoulders and pulled her around to face him, shouting that he had just lost ten thousand dollars. Then her face had gone white, first with anger, then that giving way to horror. Finally she had begun to pay attention.Conditions were improving now, though. New neighbors were moving back into the abandoned houses, one by one. Soon, Ben promised, he'd be back home for good, and then life could begin to return to normal.Too late for that now, Joseph thought.Other than Ben's absence, the Panic had introduced few direct consequences into Joseph's life. He continued to perform most of the outside chores, while Aunt Charlotte persisted in affecting a public life of extravagance on her severely stiffened budget. But even her fancy dresses had grown threadbare. She'd fooled no one, Joseph thought.Most of the abandoned houses were in town, not out on the farms, except among the new farmers who had spent every cent they owned to move West right before the troubles came. His own brothers seemed to be doing fine, although he had little contact with them. He'd seen Bill and Andy once or twice when they happened to pass through town on the way to Elkader or the river, but he hadn't seen John in years. If his brothers traveled at all, it was more commonly westward to Fayette than up this way. Sometimes he thought about riding down to visit the old places, but for some reason he never did. For one thing, who would tend the livestock while he was gone? Sam? Sam helped with few chores either outside or in the house, spending most of his time reading. Aunt Charlotte and Ben both hoped Sam would one day be a lawyer. Joseph suspected Sam was too dull to ever be a lawyer. Sam was the only one of their children for whom they sustained any ambition. Sam was still heavy, but he was growing taller, which mitigated against the frank fatness of his childhood.Joseph had never been as heavy as Sam, but the same was true for him, too: he'd grown about six inches this year, and his baby-fat was melting away to reveal the emerging shape of a strong young man, but freckles still peppered the bridge of his nose.Neither Ben nor Aunt Charlotte had ever pretended to give a second thought to any future career for Joseph. He did the work around the place. His role in the family was one of servitude. Angelina's role in the household, too, was long-since established. She was mostly responsible for taking care of her sisters ‑‑ Sarah, who was now nine, and Lillie, who was seven. One day the girls would grow up and marry and move away to support their husbands. Joseph understood these facts of life and he didn't mind. He supposed he was lucky enough that they had taken him in after his Papa and Mama had died.Lucky yes, he thought, because a lot of people aren't so lucky. We could have lost our house too, like the Nogles did. Ben's got no brains, but he didn't lose the house, did he. Had to go out and work to keep it, but at least he did that. And no one's gotten sick. That's lucky too. Other people are always dying of terrible diseases or in accidents. Like those immigrants from Ohio last month who got caught in the prairie fire. His wagon all burnt up after he got kicked in the head by one of the horses, and then him lLooking up, seeing his wife trying to come out of the wagon holding a little baby and them all in flames. They said one of the kids, there was nothing left but a piece of his skull. Land of ash and bone. And howling windstorms wiping out whole towns out on the plains. Or even down south, on the river, into Illinois. A little girl went to fetch a pail of water and was carried six miles by the wind before it set her down into a destroyed house. They found her waiting, sitting on a feather bed. Or then there were those kids killed down by Cedar Rapids. Their teacher was about to start lessons as a storm boiled up, and just then a bolt of lightning struck the schoolhouse. How many killed? Three or four, I think. Blink of an eye, all gone.Angelina didn't want to hear him talk about how he was lucky. She was more troubled by how he was treated in the family than Joseph was himself. The thought made him smile. It was funny because, while he had turned fifteen in April, and she was still a young girl, it was nevertheless Angelina who was always telling him he needed to stand up for himself.Of course he had stood up for himself sometimes, but always it made Aunt Charlotte furious and ended with him being forced to endure a long, faintly ridiculous, talking-to from Ben, and then whatever punishment they'd concocted between them. It was useless to complain."Just remember that one day you won't have to live here anymore." Andy had told him that last summer when they were alone together for a few minutes. "You'll get some work somewhere, and you'll save up some money, and you'll get to move out of this place. Just keep that in mind."Joseph recalled that hot afternoon when Andy had come through town, stopping for no more than an hour for a glass of Aunt Charlotte's cold iced tea. While he was resting, Andy had told them about a trip he'd made with his wife in the spring, taking a steamer all the way down to St Louis, and then a train across Missouri to St Joseph. The streets of St Joseph had been full of scruffy-looking deadbeats and rickety wagons crudely painted with the words "Pike's Peak or Bust!" The big news in town was that they'd just brought a famous abolitionist named Doy to the jail, a Kansas nigger-stealer. Ben, who happened to have been home at the time, asked Andy if the Missouri border was as bad as they said. Andy said no, he thought the Panic had cooled everybody down. "In fact," Andy said, "It's a lot of the old troublemakers on the border who are packing it in for Colorado.""We had our own gold rush last year," Ben said. "You hear about that? Down at Strawberry Point?"Andy frowned, squinting at him from the corners of his eyes. "No.""That's right," Ben said, "Down by your place. Surprised you didn't hear about it. And then they even found a little bit of gold up here near Volga, I think it was up at Chicken Ridge." He turned his gaze to his half-brother. "That right, Joe? Was it at Chicken Ridge?""I don't remember," Joseph said, bored."Yeah, Chicken Ridge," Ben said, "or maybe down closer to the Osborne place. I don't know, I just heard about it. Course nothing came of it."In a glancing exchange, Andy had given Joseph that mock-pitying look that said they shared a secret, and the secret was that Ben was a little sappy, and Andy felt sympathy for Joseph. All in one quick glance.A little while later, when Andy was getting ready to leave the house and continue on his journey, Joseph walked with him past the gate. That was when Andy said to remember that it wouldn't always be this way.What would it be like, Joseph wondered now as he watched the snow fall, to leave behind everything that you knew and head off into the West in a covered wagon. It must be like intentionally walking off the edge of a cliff, he thought. To cross Iowa and enter into Nebraska Territory, or go on to Oregon, or California. Or to go south along the Mississippi River all the way to New Orleans. Or even just to make the loop trip that Andy and Aunt Emily had made to Missouri. Suddenly a longing to get away filled up every atom of his being. He couldn't remember having even seen the Mississippi River, and that was less than thirty miles away. It seemed impossible to imagine that he would ever get to go on any big trip anywhere. He felt stuck.But maybe Andy's right. Someday I'll get out of here. I just have to be patient for a few more years.A few more years seemed a very long time to wait.The parlor was very quiet. The logs in the fireplace which had been popping had now settled down into red glowing coals. Aunt Charlotte and Walter and Bessie were speaking in the other room, and now and again Joseph found himself listening to their conversation."I do wish we had a piano," he heard Aunt Charlotte say. "Do you remember when we lived in Rutland, and Mother had the lovely piano? She had such a fine singing voice.""And so did you," Walter replied."Not like she did. And not like you, either. Oh Bessie, you ought to have heard Walter sing then!""He used to sing," Bessie said. "He never sings now.""He used to be such a fine, fine singer," Aunt Charlotte said. Her voice faltered a moment before she went on. "Ben was going to get us a piano. He did get us a piano, but it was lost.""Lost?" Walter said."Yes. He was having it sent by steamer all the way from Cincinnati last year, but the boat burned up at Cairo, if you can believe it.""Oh no!" Bessie said."He had insurance, of course, but it didn't fully cover the loss.""Better than nothing, I suppose," Walter said."He ought to have sent it by train," Aunt Charlotte said."The river's so dangerous," Bessie said. "And those steamers! Floating tinderboxes, I say."Joseph heard footsteps at his back, someone coming up the hallway. He recognized the sound and turned around on the chair.Angelina came into the room with her long hair folding like a dark hood around her elfin, almost boyish features. Her hair was black and a little bit coarse. She smiled when she saw him, the corners of her mouth dimpling in slightly, and she came his way. She was in her party dress, and he suddenly noticed that she was growing too. Her eyes were alert and shining. She had always seemed more intelligent than her years, or if not more intelligent than at least brighter, more aware of her surroundings. Aunt Charlotte always seemed distant and cold, he thought, while Angelina always seemed close and warm. Her complexion was a little dark, but she never failed to instantly brighten any room she entered. He thought how even the older girls at school seemed more dumb and boring than Angelina. There was a footstool close by the red velvet chair where he was, and she pulled it closer to him and sat down on it. She was carrying the wooden box full of tiny beads that Walter and Bessie had brought for her birthday. She opened it up and he saw all the little pocket-drawers inside in which the colorful little pieces of glass were carefully segregated by color and shape. She took out a needle and thread and resumed work on something she had begun earlier in the morning."What are you making?" he asked."Just a necklace. It's just practice. Later I can make a purse, or sew the beads onto a dress or something." She looked up from her work at him. "You don't want to join them in the other room?""Naw. I've just been watching the snow."She nodded and turned back to her work, falling silent.He watched her for a while. It was something she liked to do, come find him and sit by him in silence, going on then with whatever it was that she was doing. It seemed like she had always done that, that she came to wherever he was, in the house or outside. Not getting in the way, just being nearby. He thought maybe she viewed him as her big brother the protector.My little sister, he thought. It was always puzzling, though, because she wasn't his sister. Not really. One more time he tried to work it out in his mind.Papa's name was Judiah Garner, and his Papa was Oliver Garner, who died in Pennsylvania before I was born. Oliver and Olive. And John Wesley is one of Papa's brothers, which makes him my uncle. He lives down in Iowa City, past Cedar Rapids; he's come here a few times to visit, because Aunt Charlotte is his daughter. And I always forget, she's not really my aunt but my cousin, but we called her that right from the first because of how pushy she was. Who called her that first? Andy or Bill; probably Bill, right after we met them the first time when they came to Volga City, but after I came here to live she wanted me to call her that because it sounded like she had more authority to boss me around than if I called her Cousin Charlotte. . . .Mama first married a Broyles; his name was Malcolm. That makes Ben my half-brother, and so Aunt Charlotte is my cousin and my sister-in-law too. Or my half-sister-in-law. So if Ben was a son of a Broyles and a Jordan, then he has no Garner blood. No blood connection. That's why it was okay. But if there was enough distance. . . .because for example sometimes cousins get married, even first cousins. So then what are Aunt Charlotte and Ben to each other? Papa was his step-father, so John Wesley I guess is his step-uncle, so Aunt Charlotte is his step-cousin. And. . . .so what does that make Angelina to me? Am I just her uncle, and that's all there is to it? Her father's brother. . . .But that can't be right because Ben's not my full brother, and besides she must be like a second-cousin by way of Aunt Charlotte, and something like a, a. . . .half-niece-in-law by way of Ben. But she's my sister too, or she seems like she is sometimes, even though she's a Broyles and I'm a Garner. Or something like a half-sister, or maybe just some kind of foster-sister, or. . . .I don't know, it's too hard to work out. Sam's never going to be my brother, that's for sure.He watched Angelina working for a while. Another lull had fallen over the conversation in the dining room, but momentarily Joseph heard Walter speak up."That reminds me of a story. There's a butcher in McGregor whose name is Sciville, or something like that. An Englishman. I don't guess you ever heard of him?""Can't say as I have," Aunt Charlotte replied."I knew him a little," Walter continued. "I'd made a few purchases at his shop when I was on this side of the river. Seemed a decent enough fellow, a little daft, perhaps. A little deaf in one ear, so you always had to raise your voice, and he'd cock his head and squint his eyes to hear what you were asking for. Not too bright, but how bright do you have to be to be a butcher? Anyway, I hadn't been over in a while, but I came across on business in early May, I think it was, a couple years ago, and I went to the butcher shop to get something to eat. But instead of the butcher I ran into an old friend of mine, Sandford Peck, who was also looking for old Sciville. Turns out the law had been tipped off that the butcher was involved with some thieves who had been working the river, and Peck asked if I wanted to join his posse. I agreed to do so."There were only a handful of us, six or seven. The tipster had told Peck that Sciville was hiding on an island near the old Indian mounds where the Sny Magill reaches the river. We took a little skiff down and captured Sciville and two accomplices of his, an old half-blind man and a young boy no more than nine or ten."This is where the story gets interesting, because we quickly learned from these rascals that they were only in cahoots with a bigger gang run by a former veterinary doctor from McGregor who went by the name of Dr Bell ‑‑ Peck and the others knew of him, but I didn't. Our prisoners claimed Bell wasn't far away, that he was on a boat loaded with stolen property."Bessie's voice now cut in. "There had been thefts reported in Prairie du Chien," she said, "but no one had put two and two together yet.""And in McGregor," Walter said."Different things stolen out of people's yards, and even out of their homes when they were away," Bessie said. "Even a few boats had been stolen, or sometimes boats were just ransacked when no one was on board.""We took our prisoners back to town," Walter said. "That was the end of the story for me, so I missed out in what happened afterward.""Thank goodness!" Bessie said."Why? What happened?" Aunt Charlotte asked."Well, I only found out the details yesterday when we crossed the river again. I guess the next morning after I left, Peck and his posse went back down the river looking for Dr Bell, using the boy as their guide. Peck and his men were hiding in the brush and the boy called out to Bell from the shore where his boat was tied up. When Bell came out on deck, Peck and the others came up out of the brush to arrest him. Then a gunfight ensued, with even Bell's wife shooting a shotgun at the posse. Peck managed to hit Bell a grazing blow off the head, but quickly the boat slipped away downstream and disappeared into the fog.""You mean they got away?" Aunt Charlotte said, sounding aghast."For a while," Walter said. "The next day Peck returned with a bigger posse, but Bell was long gone. Still, they found two abandoned boats that were loaded down with more than five thousand dollars worth of stolen property.""That much!""It gets better than that," Walter said. "It turns out that Bell had scores of pirates working for him all up and down the Mississippi and Ohio Rivers. It was a regular business enterprise. Everything came to Bell, and everyone got a cut. Eventually the stolen goods would be shipped down river all the way to the gulf, and everything was sold in Texas. Who knows how many thousands of dollars worth of property they stole throughout the country.""I don't believe it!" Aunt Charlotte said. "And did they ever catch this Dr Bell?""It took a while," Walter said, "but I believe they caught him in Michigan."Angelina looked up from her sewing at Joseph. "The bread will be done soon," she said.He inhaled, smelling it. "Yes," he said."Do you think there's going to be a war?" she asked, slightly angling her head.He looked at her closely. "Yes," he said."Why?""Andy told me. I believe Andy."She was silent for a moment, absorbing this, and then she said: "What will happen when the war starts?"He shook his head."I don't know. No one knows."She nodded. "Do you think Papa will have to go and fight?"He shrugged."I don't know. He's more than thirty years old. He might. But maybe because of his business he won't have to.""How about. . . .you and Sam?""I don't think so. We're not old enough. It will be over before either of us would have to go."She put the necklace she was making down into the box which was open in her lap. She reached over to his hand and held onto it."I hope you never have to go.""Me too," Joseph said.He thought: Me too.
