Shelved

By Jeanne G'Fellers, Edward Karshner, Cindy O'Quinn and 7 more

To write or not to write, the author dilemma of 2020. Certainly, life has become stranger than fiction, so eleven Appalachian authors gathered their courage and dug deep to present a flowing anthology of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry inspired by Covid-19 or rewritten during the pandemic. Here reside near-autobiographical tales of hardscrabble mountain education, plus familial and societal laments. Even a dragon hides amidst the pages. It’s a well-knit, often emotional read of reflection, eyeing our present, and looking ahead. All is not lost. No, some things have merely been Shelved.

Authors: Jeanne G'Fellers, Edward Karsher, Cindy O'Quinn, Brend G'Fellers, sarah elizabeth, Jean Bruce, Anne G'Fellers-Mason, Patrick Stickley, Jeremy Greco, Jule Corriere

• Language: English
• Publisher: Mountain Gap Books
• Release date: Dec 14, 2020
• ISBN: 9781005962814

Jeanne G'Fellers

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Introduction

From Jeanne G’Fellers, Editor of Shelved:

It’s September as I write this, and it feels as though 2020 has lasted both thirty years and thirty minutes at once. The phrase chaos, mayhem, and disorder comes to mind, or perhaps the old Hee Haw lament, Gloom despair and agony might be more to the point, but nothing since March 2020 has been what anyone would call normal. Schools have closed, there have been odd waves of grocery shortages such as toilet paper, and finding a can of spray disinfectant is like finding a needle in the proverbial haystack. We’re working at home, attending school online whether we signed up for it or not, and planting neo victory gardens to supplement our curbside grocery pickups. COVID-19 has turned our lives upside down and filled us with dread as we’ve watched the number of ill and dead first slowly then dramatically climb. As the numbers have spiked, we’ve been forced to draw inward. Into our homes, into our families, into ourselves, and, as writers, this causes us to reflect on our past writings and drives us to express our current concerns, fears, and hopes for tomorrow.

In March, at the beginning of the pandemic, three oddly interrelated things happened at nearly the same time for the MGB staff: an art journal page, a poem, and a conversation. The art journal page was mine and is titled Shelved. It’s a mixed media page of three shelves holding a variety of items representing the past, present and future, but the page as a whole holds a decidedly vintage edge. It’s housed in what I’m calling my pandemic art journal. The poem, written by our publisher, Brenda G’Fellers, is also titled Shelved and appears as the first selection in this anthology. The third item, the conversation, took place in March as the last Mountain Gap in-person meeting of 2020. So much might need to be shelved due to the pandemic, events, appearance, possibly publications… We discussed our fears, hopes, and how our recent creative expressions had widely focused on the pandemic. Moreover, we wondered how others were faring. Were they experiencing the same roadblocks? Were they just as tempted to pull old writings from their shelves to keep their creative juices flowing? Were they able to write at all? This new reality of ideas, plans, hopes, of so very much being set aside due to COVID-19 became the general focus of our email and phone conversations after our March meeting.

That’s how Shelved, which is flowingly divided into three sections representing the past reflections and laments, present worries and WTFs, and future fears and hopes, was born.

Shelved

By Brenda G’Fellers

Old journals

with old goals.

Some realized,

Some left behind

inert, tattered shards.

What have I shelved?

Volumes of poetry

Written in moments

Of personal anguish.

Short stories, written for

A variety of reasons and

audiences.

And biography

I need to edit; I will.

Journals are shelved, too,

Though some remain unpacked

From our last move. I do reread them.

Do you keep yours shelved

For future rereading?

Inheritance

By Edward Karshner

The story goes that the great Shawnee leader Cornstalk had a village on this ridge overlooking Atwater. It was built here on the highest point in Kinnikinnick County. My Dad says this was where the women and children were sent during times of war. The Kinnikinnick River cuts right beneath it. It’s a place where the river lives and flows, bearing witness and remembering.

***

My Grampa, Rufus Waites, had little patience for the human condition. He figured that no matter the problem, you took the fight to it before it brung the fight to you. In World War II, he was a rifleman in the 7th Army, 45th Infantry Division. He seldom talked about his service, having dug a void between himself and the war. I never would've known this myself, except I looked up his Army patch at the public library and read in a Time Life book that it was his outfit who liberated Dachau. My Dad told me to never mention it to the old man. So what little I knew of his service was a matter of transgression and happenstance.

Once, my Dad took me to a traveling Vaudeville retrospective show that came to the historic Majestic Theatre on Water Street in downtown Atwater. Back in its day, the Majestic had been a stop on the Vaudeville circuit. Local legend told that to this very day, written in grease paint on the walls of the old dressing rooms, were the autographs of Charlie Chaplin, WC Fields, and the Marx Brothers. The show was part live performers and part silent shorts. At seven years old, I became infatuated with Charlie Chaplin. So one Sunday, I was running around the house, chasing my cousins with a square patch of black electrician’s tape stuck under my nose. Grampa materialized out of the shadows and twisted my skinny arms in his massive, calloused hands. His eyes raged like the animals I’d seen steel trapped in the woods.

What the Hell's wrong with you, he said through clenched teeth. Don't you know that son of a bitch murdered millions of innocent people?

Who? I cried. Charlie Chaplin?

Later, in high school, while studying the war in Europe, Mr. Lark, my history teacher, taught us about the evil that men do under the guise of a just war. Mr. Lark was an over-privileged Ivy Leaguer, enjoying a period of liberal Rumspringa before moving back to some eastern city to work for Daddy’s hedge fund company. I like to think Mr. Lark felt he was doing some good. But his ideas were certainly philosophically left of anything I'd ever heard growing up. He started with Nazi atrocities and ended with the retribution killings of S.S. officers and concentration camp guards by US soldiers. The most heinous incident, he said, had been carried out by the 45th infantry at Dachau.

Despite Dad’s warning, I decided to ask Grampa if what Mr. Lark had said was right. Grampa was in the barn shoeing a neighbor’s horse. He was shirtless, a leather apron over his bare chest, tied at the waist. While I set up the question, he stopped working, looking at, through, and past me.

I asked.

He went back to his work. With gentle precision, he tapped the farrier nail, the horse’s hoof clamped between his knees. He put down the hammer and took a crumpled pack of Pall Malls from his toolbox. He lit one and looked over my head into the distance.

Nature has a way of balancin’ itself out, he said, flicking an ash onto the dirt floor. He reached for the hammer, gripping it until his knuckles were white. Besides, the assholes had it comin’. That would be the most I’d ever hear him say on the subject.

After the war, Grampa worked as a cop for a while but by his own admission lacked the proper temperament. So before my Dad was born, Grampa took the job of facilities manager for a lumber company. Collins Paper Wood had bought an old Army munitions depot right outside Arbordale, in southeastern Kinnikinnick County, to store equipment and fuel as they clear-cut what they could of the Hocking Hills. Grampa’s salary was simple; he was given an old, ramshackle farmhouse immediately in front of the depot and was allowed to live there for free. His utilities were paid. For cash, he worked a series of odd jobs. He worked as a farrier, was a damn fine mechanic and autobody man, and farmed the eighty acres the old house sat on.

He also trapped foxes, rabbits, and raccoons for their fur and sold them in town. On one occasion, I must have been five, Grampa took me to the Arbordale General S&T to sell his pelts. The S&T was run by twin brothers, Robert and Robbie. When I was eighteen, I bought my first shotgun there, a Mossenberg 12 gauge pump, with money made working nights in the furnace at the glass plant in Atwater. Grampa bought me some hardtack and talked fishing and politics over beers with the brothers. I wandered the aisles looking at military surplus canvas bags and old saddles. I ran my fingers over the cold metal of rifle barrels, pawned until next year's deer season. Fertilizer burned my nose. In the backroom, where the double service doors opened to frame the undulating green of the Hocking Hills, I stood audience to the heads and faces of animal pelts looking down from their place on the wall. Empty. Like they had stepped out of their clothes and went somewhere else to be someone else—a new life millions of years from these hills.

With the smell of the S&T stuck to my Sears and Roebuck denim jacket, I climbed in the front seat of the 1957 Chevy station wagon. Firing up a Pall Mall, Grampa coaxed the Chevy to life as Waylon Jennings finished his thesis regarding the nature of a brown eyed handsome man on the AM radio. He worked the cigarette with his lips as we waited for Wade Cooper to chum-chum-chum past us on Main Street in his Sassy Grass Green 1971 Road Runner. Most people in Kinnikinnick County knew that Wade Cooper was a failed NASCAR driver and occasional mechanic who had kept the same girlfriend since high school. Now what I knew was that Wade was also married to my aunt, my Dad's youngest sister. Grampa watched as the Road Runner cruised past us, a dark-haired girl in the passenger seat, not my blonde aunt, kissing Wade's neck.

What in the Hell is this, then? Grampa said. He eased the Chevy into a left turn behind Wade until both cars stopped at the one traffic light at the intersection of Main and Route 315. We watched in silence as Wade and