The Harbingers of Spring

By David Roller

The Harbingers of Spring is fiction and is a tale of hope set in the surroundings of the author's grandfather's farm in Brown County, Indiana, of memories from the first decades of his life, born of childhood loneliness, amid things he would do if he had the choice to get people to come and visit. This book follows decades of the development of a festival in the Sweetwater Creek valley. It is a presentation of equality and diversity that follows a girl and boy in their pursuit of forbidden love. It presents a global input into a microcosm while the harbingers of spring, from the constellations to the flowers to the wildlife, to annual happenings, mark the growth and education of the two main characters.

This education is punctuated by the genetic development of a grand champion bull and a bloodline of prized cattle and the production of mules. A world court is depicted that hears cases of the lovelorn, annually, and gives opinions up to and including the provision of weddings. The book depicts the conversations of all introduced characters from wherever to the constants of the rural setting: the rules of bathing on the porch in a washtub and spitting on one's finger to entice the butterflies and making a bed of two pairs of pants for lovemaking. The story expands out of harsh fundamentalism, the ugliness of the gangs of Great Britain, the old assertion that behind every great fortune lies a crime (Balzac 1834), the drug cartels, and the systematic destruction in the prisoner of war camps. Love does triumph.

The driving force of the girl protagonist is the belief that if you have been denied of your own dreams, you should do whatever you can to help others not be denied their dreams.

The Harbingers of Spring is a retelling of stories made up by the author to maintain interest by his wife in fighting leukemia, born of desperation--an effort to entice her to want to hang on, just to hear one more story, and a plea for her to continue to live.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Page Publishing, Inc.
• Release date: Jun 12, 2023
• ISBN: 9798886543520

Book preview

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The Harbingers of Spring

David Roller

Copyright © 2023 David Roller

All rights reserved

First Edition

PAGE PUBLISHING

Conneaut Lake, PA

First originally published by Page Publishing 2023

ISBN 979-8-88654-345-2 (pbk)

ISBN 979-8-88654-352-0 (digital)

Printed in the United States of America

Table of Contents

Prologue

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

Chapter 31

Chapter 32

Chapter 33

Chapter 34

Chapter 35

Chapter 36

Chapter 37

Chapter 38

Chapter 39

Chapter 40

Chapter 41

Chapter 42

Chapter 43

Chapter 44

Chapter 45

Chapter 46

Chapter 47

Chapter 48

Chapter 49

Chapter 50

Chapter 51

Chapter 52

Chapter 53

Chapter 54

Chapter 55

Chapter 56

Chapter 57

Chapter 58

Chapter 59

Chapter 60

Chapter 61

Chapter 62

Chapter 63

Chapter 64

Chapter 65

Chapter 66

Chapter 67

Chapter 68

Chapter 69

Chapter 70

Chapter 71

Chapter 72

Chapter 73

Chapter 74

Epilogue

About the Author

To my wife, who came back home to me from illness in 2008 that scared me so bad I shudder even today. I really did do everything that I could just to keep her here with me. When you feel me reach out in the night and touch your hair, it is because it was not there for so long. Then even half asleep and habitually touching you to see if you are all right, I feel your hair and twirl your hair. And I know that you are all right again. And I can sleep.

Prologue

There are times in life when one desperately tries to keep someone's attention with your chest ripping open from effort and your mind tumbling about in possibilities to try, to fail at, to succeed with so that this someone very special has held onto a lifeline and wanted to wake up in the morning just to hear a little bit more of a story you were making up about a girl's adventures in life because that story was about my wife and says in thousands of words the sense of worship one has for your person and yourself, begging you please don't die and leave me alone because you've been everything to me, and I can go on and on forever if you will just stay interested in my tripe¹ and wake to listen. Just listen for now, and tomorrow we will do something more to keep you on the road to recovery.²

When my wife lay dying of leukemia at fifty-eight years old, I told her stories I made up about herself that she enjoyed and wanted to absorb. So that I had to weave more and more into our story, so she would not give up and let this thing take her from me. I was like one of those infusions that dripped into her, prolonging life. And, with success, I don't want to look back at that desperation, but keep her, and live on.

One night, I dreamed of harbingers of spring. I remember this as watching as they gave her the stem cell transplant. It was summer, but I couldn't help but think even then that by spring, we would be back nearer to normal and living our lives. Honestly, people can be excused for being naive when one is scared to death, as in watching cancer take your wife away. I had no idea what a trial we were still in for, and I will say without reservation that coaxing her interest in wanting to hear stories seemed as likely to help as anything. It was a really bad time. When spring did come, I remembered the transplant and gave it credit due to it, as I give credit to anointing and hands-on healing that happened.

This is pretty typical of how ideas come to me that I can expand upon, which makes it difficult in that I'm not particularly prepared to expand on much. Oh, I can. It's just that at about the third word I'm way over there, somewhere. I was going over some short stories with my wife this morning. We're seventy, now. I will roll out of bed at 2:00 a.m. and furiously catch up with ideas that awoke me. Then I do the research. Then I apply a scripture, or forget the idea altogether (I don't support the devil). Then I write a poem about the topic. Come morning, I read aloud to my wife, and she generally rips me a new one. You see? We study in bed at night, and often it is very good advice on how to construct sentences or fiction or nonfiction or articles or Christmas cards or threats to Republicans or reading all of the Bible in one year. For instance, I know that one way to tell if a sentence is any good is to read it aloud to see if it flows.

My wife writes small articles for the newspaper and has very little patience with what doesn't flow. She read me her article on persimmons this morning, and I have to admit that it flowed very well. After I listened, I responded with a historical treatise on the use of persimmon wood for driver heads in vintage golf with colloquial comments like, You have to hit it on the screws.³ She thanked me by telling me, Now I have to start all over. Then I read to her an account of a cult wherein a mother had her daughter's teeth pulled out so she would shut up trying to get somebody to rescue her from that cult.

Naturally, I was concerned about how the material flowed. My wife didn't say it flowed well or that it didn't flow at all or it flowed a bit and then stifled. No, she said, I wish you hadn't written that. It about makes me sick. Now that makes me think about so many in life who have focused on the content and kept to the subject trying to suck up. Very few are critical, and I may have married the only one to get right to the point and say, Don't do that. That's gross. Still, I have to get something done. I can't just throw everything out.

At the Christmas tree farm this year, my wife turned to me in front of all those people working there and said, Are you just going to stand there and do nothing? People were rolling on the ground, laughing, and I was leaning on a cane with a very sprained ankle and doing nothing. But it flowed. You see.

So I selected half a dozen stories I'd done and told her I changed them since she last heard them and want her honest opinion. She listened to all of them, then gave me her honest opinion on stories she had never heard, that I had not changed at all, and that I had not shared with her because I was mortally afraid of what her response would be. I can trick her, you see. It's part of being married. I once did a short story on how my grandfather got his farm. The family who owned it had incest problems, and the father had to leave the state or go to prison, so when the farm went up for Sheriff's Auction, Grandpa bought it there on the east side of the courthouse with Minor Smith (Grocer, Notary Public, and Auctioneer) officiating. Minor had his hand in everything he could possibly do to make money. So we got a farm, and a mentally compromised girl had to go live at Central State Hospital, and the story was good, and it flowed. But I'll be damned if my wife didn't explain to me that only a disreputable would choose a topic about incest. I mean, she meant that she knows it exists as much as anybody but certainly not at this time and certainly not in this place. So why go to the trouble of reminding people that they moved from some hellhole where it did exist? So I told her about Lot's daughters and that Cain had to have produced children with his mother or his sisters, and Moses was a product of incest, and my personal opinion is that the whole issue of disparaging the reproductive practices of the Zoroastrians and the Yanomamo Indians and the ancient Egyptians when all that really matters is genetic testing before babies are made, and if there is no reason not to proceed or if your sister is too old to conceive, there is nothing involved here except the privacy of consenting adults. And anyone who says differently is a follower of Adolf Hitler and Eugenics from the 1930s. And two states do allow brother and sister marriages under the right circumstances already. To this argument, my wife said, "I will kill you if you don't shut up.⁴"

Try to see where she is coming from. Her article published last week was about leaves changing color. And it also flowed.

And that's how our mornings usually start. Well, we'll have coffee, and throat clearing antihistamines, but we're basically retired, so we can discuss this stuff all day if we have to, to allow it some clarity at least. I'm not saying she fixes us a nice breakfast or anything. She's nobody's piece of property. If I want some eggs, I'm gathering six or seven a day so they're always fresh. And I've got a unique way with scrambled eggs I wouldn't trust anybody to replicate. I put a pad of butter in a hot skillet with a splash of 2 percent milk and break three small eggs into a bowl, then dump them into the skillet. Then I add a daub of unground mustard in vinegar, salt, and pepper. Then I stir and scrape it until it is scrambled eggs, and I tell you I don't need any bread or other, except for black coffee to have a really good meal. Once I even poured the juice from a jar of jalapeños in it, but it scared me it as so good, and I never attempted it again. In fact, blackberry jam is something we eat while studying in bed at night as a dessert. All I'm saying is that breakfast is truly the most important meal of the day.

She said that her last article about breakfast was about pancakes. And it flowed.

So I told her about this story I wrote about an old couple who lived in the town I grew up in. Joseph Winthrop was an electrician from back in the day when cloth insulation-covered wiring was strung from one glass insulator to another in people's attics. (FYI, I'm seventy-two.) Around the time, people started getting radios out in the backwoods that had a crystal floating in a liquid. A while later, individually owned gasoline generators arrived, and people's lights would brighten and dim and brighten and dim from DC currents. Then REMC brought in power, and people actually had televisions with nine-inch screens on which you could watch the fights on Friday nights. That's what Mr. Winthrop put in and maintained. But he got old, and one morning, Mrs. Winthrop woke up with him lying in the bed next to her stone-cold dead. So everybody in town was trying to help her cope, and one of the ladies said, How awful. What did you do? And Mrs. Winthrop said, Why, I got up and fixed me some breakfast. I was in no condition to deal with all that on an empty stomach.

And that is a fact with absolutely nothing to do with debauchery. Though one could wonder with the way that old man talked over at the gas station with all the other hangers-on. I mean, jeez, they were ninety years old, and he's going on and on like he's sixteen. And oh! Don't back up. She's also going on and on like she's sixteen so much that all those women coming to comfort her were probably wondering if she is in fact what killed him. Anybody would think so with her dirty old mind, bragging on his sexual prowess. But this was a different day, with the loss and all. And she didn't bite on the sexual bait. She just told them all that the last thing he said to her was that he wanted her to remarry if and when he died because he fully intended to when and if she died.

I told my wife that If I were to write our story, that's about how it would sound because it doesn't matter much to men that a woman can literally drive a man over the edge. Not if she's a perfect fit. I mean, if I went out searching for Sis, I'd not have found her in forty miles from Sunday. These things are delivered to you as gifts from above, and there's no reason to argue with gifts.

Yesterday, I woke up with harbingers of spring on my mind, witch hazel and Erigenia bulbosa, and I remembered that it made perfect sense to her that we just live together because I'd get the milk for free without having to buy the cow. Let me just tell you right here. I stumbled around in life and got absolutely nothing, and then a hint of spring happened, and I know with every fiber of my being that it is real, and I want it for mine and so we married for forever. And now there's everything, and I have someone to talk to, and she has someone to watch Hallmark Christmas movies with.

When she asked me what I'm going to do with all the Christmas decorations if she is gone, I said I'm going to bring them down, go cut a tree, and decorate for Christmas. And afterward, I'm going to put it in trunks and carry it back up to the garret. She said, You've never helped me one time to decorate for Christmas. Why would you wait until I'm dead to start? Well, I'll give her that one. But I spent a whole life before her decorating for Christmas and not doing it justice, and I've enjoyed watching what she brings to it. So that's my excuse and that I'll die trying to get through the seasons alone. I'll be wanting to remember us. I mean the good things, not the taking care of her through cancer. Who would want to dwell on that? I mean, I'm glad I was strong enough. But come on! And that's my explanation.

I once took her to a lodge with a huge fireplace in the room, and it was the coldest day in years, and we camped out there with the fire reflection dancing on her skin as she lay on her stomach on the rug in front of that fire, and we had Christmas. I can't go back there. They tore the place down long ago. But I have the fireplace we built because of that, and I can sit beside it and remember you and how perfect and beautiful you were. And are. And always have been. And always will be.

So don't be trying to get me to agree with you that life can only happen if we divorce. Just leave, and a deputy will knock on my door about the same time I figure out you're not coming back. Country music was written about us, and I'm determined to go on and live this dream forever. You don't seem to realize that it works with you and not with others and never with others. It isn't as you say, Just physics. And anything will do. Not for me.

And she said, Not for me either.

But some things will go right over her head unless I talked them out with her. This morning, it was the infinity symbol, which is basically a private communication between me and my wife that I draw on her shoulder while she is sleeping, that she interprets somewhere on a continuum from not responding at all to passionate lovemaking. And that too made perfect sense once I'd talked it out with her. What I'm saying is we're not on this earth to be alone, even if she threatens me with divorce about every two and a half weeks. There is always the time back when I tore her marriage apart, stealing her, and she looked at me and said, It's the kisses because she was confused about all of it too and couldn't resist me for the life of her. I'm never going to let her go.⁵

And that includes after I'm gone. She can be miserable alone and not be ruining my day, thanks, wherever I end up. And I'm feeling pretty good about that these days. The fact is, and she's right, it's likely I'll be left alone, and I am bitter about that. And she's also right. I need to get over that. People go on all the time about one's (one and only) and (once in a lifetime loves). And there will never be another. And I was lucky to find this one (and her ex-husband was unlucky I found this one). And that's for whatever society says about that, even if it was thirty years ago.

The last time she offered to print out divorce papers for me to sign, she asked me, Can we just agree that divorce is wrong? Of course, she didn't mean from me, and I answered, No! I don't want a divorce. I'd never agree with her that she's right about that. Just like I'd never agree that I'm no different from other men. That women are just there, and it's men that go from one flower to another to another, like bees. So I reminded her that bees are all girls.

And she said, Well, if I had just tried harder, I could have stayed married. Even if that had ruined you, it wouldn't have ruined him.

And I said, Well what's the difference who you destroy? And I think you're forgetting the guy is a millionaire, where he wouldn't do a day's work when you were with him. Just go on and run to him, even if it's been thirty years and he's visited his share of flowers since then.

And she said, Well, I had kids with him. That's the difference. Ask anybody.

And I said, Well, if I'd asked anybody, I wouldn't be lying next to you today. I don't care what people think.

And she said, Well, I do, and that's the difference.

And I said, Well, march all the biddies in here and have them pile on because they'd rather be you than anyone else. They see you happy and doted on and danced with and everything you do supported. So just go on and leave, and I'll bet my pension one of them will be knocking on my door to give me emotional support and, otherwise, the best they can do for a man. And I will just puke.

And she said, Well, I've never seen you puke over any woman.

And I said, Well, I swallow a little throw up and nobody notices.

And she said, Well, you never have a kind thing to say about any of my friends.

And I said, For Pete's sake, they are featured in my books, causing all men to swallow a little throw up. What do you want from me?

And she said, "I'm not saying we won't date. We'll be hot as ever. We'll do our bucket list. We'll cruise to Alaska. We'll be back here studying tomorrow night.

And I said, Try me. I'll move to where I can hide. I'll never speak to you again. Why are you doing this?

And she said, Because it makes you a desperate lover.

And that also flows.

Chapter 1

At seventy-two, we anticipate butterflies in early spring. That means close to home, and out and about. We take alternate routes to observe last year's milkweed plants along the roadsides and fields and byways and interstate corridors. People are out for all kinds of reasons. We're out for the butterflies. I'm old, and I pee a lot, so to spot the butterflies is to pee unobserved to draw them. Then Sis will spit on her finger and try to get them to light on her finger to drink. And people can say, Maybe so. But she swears it's the males that come to drink spit. Soon enough, she'll point out the black spots on the wings and prove it. So, I think, I taught you that because you're mine. But she'd never admit that. She'd say, You put out the nastiest stuff for the boys to attract them, stale beer and rotten fruit and mudholes. And I'm thinking, they are after minerals in stuff. She wouldn't buy that either. They're boys, so they're just like me, so nobody should be shocked when they do the nastiest things.

My name is David.⁶ I generally introduce myself as Dave. I've been called Dave, Davey, Davey Boy, Bub, Bubby Dave, Doodle Bug, my honey,⁷ and Pooch. I'm five-ten, weighing two-ten. I hurt when I do about anything, from old fractures, and other injuries I mostly just live with. I do take a lot of pills (no pain pills). I like to sit in an evening and drink a vodka or two, in orange juice, to sort of numb me a little before showering (the first thing taken away from me by Sis to put me on a diet was vodka). I'll generally follow that with two eight-ounce glasses of wolfberry juice in coconut water because my wife tells me to, and it does replace electrolytes and makes your body feel suddenly worth saving. I like earth tones. And left to my own devices, I would consistently camouflage in such, or else in military drab, somehow. But I have been guilty of walking downstairs in red slacks from European Male Catalogue (with visible thong), or Seersucker slacks and polo shirt, and been made to think my name is Hey and to go back upstairs and change.

I've entertained people for years, telling them that my wife dresses me like a small boy, but a lot of that is surely my fault. Orange is my favorite color, and if I had my way, I'd present with a background of orange as cars, motorcycles, wall paint, flower beds, etc. I am self-studied (autodidacticism). I mean, I went to college to be a nurse, then spent fifty years practicing, and never had time to really enjoy college because of that. So I've always studied on my own and highly recommend it as a discipline. I grew up poor. I have always worked, though I am retired at present on a little hobby farm I have owned for fifty years. I have been married twice, once for twenty years, once for seventeen years to someone I've lived with for thirty years.

I have eight children, fifteen grandchildren, one great-granddaughter, and one great-grandson due in January. I ride a Black Harley Sportster Iron 883. (They didn't have it in orange in 2019.) I'm seventy-two years old. My dad is ninety-seven and still has his black Indian hair.⁸ My hair is brown going gray, like my mother's hair was, but long and done up in a ponytail. I'm the oldest boy of five siblings, all living, and living all over. I have required medical and psychological support for over fifty years for PTSD. Much of that has been the concern over if I'm gay, though people have laughed at that notion. I've had no romantic relationships with men. I can say that for most girls and women I have ever been involved with in any measure, most of them would take me back. And that has more to do with girls being drawn to effeminate qualities men can have and not one thing to do with being a jock, which I'm not. I did play sports. I did hate playing sports.

My wife says that I forget that girls can equally be drawn to bad boys, which I am. I'm kind of proud she sees that in me. And I can be as mean as two snakes. My counselors over time have been largely duplicate efforts because I've become very good at not letting people near me who can see through their thumbs. If they know what I'm thinking, I might as well just die. Two have been what I would call excellent. One focused on recurrent memories and nightmares that would often find me catatonic in a tub of water with a doctor giving me a shot. For this, he gave me a cue in the song 96 Tears, ⁹ where I can call these memories up for the purpose of therapy, and otherwise, they are dimmed in importance to me. My most recent counselor explained to me in detail that I am not gay but probably wish I was to have some normalcy. But worse, I fall into a category of being asexual that is called being demisexual, meaning that I can function sexually with someone I trust totally, or I can't function. And that's why I'm freaking out of my mind nuts over this woman I'm married to. She is everything to me. She allows me to be normal, sort of. That's called an obsession. I have them, over people, and over things, two things, and one person, and grandkids. But mostly over Sis, and my obsession is not to be shared. Also, I have always had an obsession with the sweepstakes. First one major sweepstakes, then the other, twenty-five years each, faithfully, with zero cause to continue. And I have an obsession with being black. It's private, so I'll just say, the Army says I am, genetics say that I am, and you may watch who I send donations to and who I vote for if you must. And I have an obsession with this little farm because I feel safe here, with every reason to continue. And so Sis has me putting all obsessions under one lid to watch it simmer and bring in the grandkids for proof. My obsession has been to win five-hundred-thousand tokens every day and spend it on one hundred chances to win Sis a car (she likes cars). The farm is self-explanatory, except that I bought it fifty years ago because I needed a place to feel safe, and as long as I'm obsessed with it, prettier flowers grow every year. Of course, the grandkids are like the board of directors for this farm. They vote bunnies and ducks. They get bunnies and ducks.

When I bought this farm, I was thinking of Edvard Munch, feeling safe on his little farm in Oslo. I don't go around stealing the identities of famous painters. If I did, it would be Matisse, I'm sure, but when I first became aware of Munch's Silent Scream, I felt the affinity I have associated with every person I've ever allowed to be close to me. Two or three maybe, counting my mother. And I don't want to talk about it (something I tell any therapist whom I can sense is able to see through his thumb and read my mind).

Hello.

My wife's name is Sis.¹⁰ She's been called Sissy-Lynn,¹¹ Kat, Kathy, Kathryn,¹² Miss Kitty, and Sis (after Abram's sister wife, Sara¹³). I call her Kat and Sis interchangeably, and often Kathryn in public because I don't feel she has been respected enough in life, so I respect her. Otherwise, she has been called Miss Kitty by coworkers and Kathy by most others. She was also a nurse forever, retired because of leukemia. She survived leukemia and a transplant for leukemia. She is very intelligent, writes articles, studies a lot, and studies a lot with me. She is sports-minded and a car junkie. She likes to travel. She has tons of friends, whereas I have only her. She holds very high regard for women and a very low regard for men. This comes from her father (a professor in Japan, Kuwait, Hong Kong, Bahrain, Okinawa, and the USA but abandoned her and left her nothing) and two previous marriages we won't talk about. And she had a career of standing toe to toe with men, doing their work for them, and being denied credit for it.

To pointed questions about what is she doing with me if she hates men, she says, Well, I don't think of him as a man. And that's okay. I don't really know what it means to be a man either. But, buddy, that had better mean something positive because if she decides in a second that she does think of you as a man, your ass is over the edge. Done and done. She has short brown hair, going gray, sixty-four inches, and 134 pounds. She is beautiful, denies that, and never allows a photograph to be taken of her.

One time, she wore an orange dress that took my breath away. I have a shadow box in my orange room (study) holding that orange dress, her orange sandals, orange butterflies, and a copy of the novel The Girl in the Orange Dress. I sit in my recliner and dwell on it. The first time I saw her all grown up, she had been working in surgery all night and came through the breakfast line, alone, with her scrub dress open down the back and wearing only a pair of white cotton panties. I remember nearly dropping my scrambled eggs out of my mouth, thinking, You're my kind of people. I love you. The second time I saw her all grown up, she was reading a bulletin board with her knee up on an office chair, wearing her whites. She felt my eyes on her and turned to me and said, What? And I swallowed and said, I think we're supposed to be married. We were engaged forever when we were kids, but life got in the way. Then I renewed it when she walked back into my life. Of course, only one of us was serious. But I'm proud I was strong enough to just get to the point because, sixteen years later, we were married, which was my idea. A lady lawyer who was the daughter of the first physician I ever worked for, and who I used to babysit for, got a judge pro temp so she could marry us, and we invited seventy people who wished us well. Some of the uninvited were our own kids. We threw everything we had into it, and people ate and drank everything so that after we cleaned up the hotel, we drove to Bob Evans for breakfast just to get something to eat. Now we were in our fifties by then, and we did our best to have fun with it because it wasn't easy getting there. She chose a raisin-colored material for her dress and carried a bouquet of dried pods to emphasize her old woman status. I went searching for every gay tailor I ever knew to make me a suit to go with her dress. And the result was spectacular. I mean, I looked good. And the guys had worked so hard and fought so much over fifty dress shirts and forty ties and sixty colors of socks to go with my green pinstripe I will be buried in. And they would measure my inseam until they left marks and would threaten, Well, I guess I know raisin! And everything came together, and nurses and doctors and Marines and barbers and performers from Madam Walker's and old Hippies and women in severe men's suits all came together and wished us well. And that night, I couldn't perform as a man. And that was my second wedding wherein I couldn't perform as a man. And to my expressed concern, she said, Well! Nonsense. So! Meet Sis.

This account is about me and Sis. Two people who were meant to be together. I knew her from infancy when our moms would lay a washcloth over our faces and their breasts and nurse us side by side in church. I mean, I was focused, but I knew she was there. And she was focused, but hers was just a meal while she had thoughts about me. My memories come later, say at four years old, though she was always there before, just always looking at me, but things started happening between us at about four.

On a Sunday afternoon, in 1954, when she wasn't supposed to come over, but did, I was in the open door of our detached garage, driving nails into a chunk of wood. For some reason, there was a keg of old nails in our garage that I couldn't move, so I moved this chunk of firewood that hadn't been split, and I occupied myself with driving nails into it. There were lots of nails and lots of places to drive nails in that chunk of wood. And I had to drive the nails using both hands on the hammer handle because it was heavy, and I was four, like I said. So I was dripping sweat, and I sensed her, and I looked up, and there was Sissy-Lynn squatting there facing me, watching me. She had both hands on her knees over her dress tail, and I could see plain as day her white cotton panties. And I bent the nail I was driving and had to spend time trying to get it out. Now I had been at this for some time—I mean weeks. So I was better than bending nails unless I saw something else that made me think of possibilities. And she had that effect on me. Even when I eventually saw her naked, and I had already, and I would a lot more, nothing unmanned me like looking at her white cotton panties, with her in them. It's just one of those things. And she knew it because if I could have looked away at something else, I would have. And she let me see them a lot. And she still does.

So before I could say a word, or before she could say, Can I try, my dad came out of the kitchen door in his socks where he had been napping and lifted me by the arm, embarrassingly, and told Sissy-Lynn to go home embarrassingly. And I saw her look at me, and I had seen her mom lift her by an arm and round a corner, and then I heard her get spanked for one thing or another. So I knew she was going to hear this happen. And he rounded a corner and spanked me. And I still do not know at seventy if he spanked me for waking him or for wasting nails or for her being over or for me seeing her panties.

I think that unless you are a four-year-old Kamayurá Indian in the rain forest living in a communal shelter and imitating adults copulating in public that little children don't have vivid mind pictures of sex. I think that is learned. And I guess kids do learn stuff and learn wrong from sexual abuse, but I wouldn't have known what that meant then, and neither would she have. But what do I know? I think I wanted to be married to her so I could be nice to her and feed her grapes. That was about all I could put together to reason out how I felt about her at four years old. Even if such was crippling and getting spanked in front of her made me just want to die.

All I know is that after the belittling spanking, he held me by both arms and told me I'm not supposed to be working on the sabbath or some such horse shit on that day I quit listening to him.

Otherwise, I had light hair and gray eyes, olive skin, wore one of Pa's¹⁴ straw fedoras, went barefoot or wore yellow Galeton boots, and wore bib overalls while she had what my mother called auburn hair (I always thought her hair complimented Hamblen-Dexter, her red bull, until I saw her in orange) and brown eyes, freckles, and wore patterned dresses with an apron and white cotton socks and panties and strap shoes or yellow Galeton boots, and was never dirty. This is our story.

Chapter 2

When I think about the courtships of birds, I think of robins. My best poem was about a courtship of thrushes.¹⁵ I carve birds, so I study birds, and I can tell you that robins are out there on the lawn because they are hunting, and they can hear bugs and worms out there. They can also whip a butt load of grackles that try to interfere with what they are doing. They also start early and clutch more than one nest of babies. Their eggs are blue and why Sis is interested. She takes pictures of their blue eggs in nests and puts them in the newspaper with an article about spring. Robins are one of the first hints of spring. Things are waking up and becoming the food chain below robins. These are examples of monogamy, yet subject to male replacement if a disaster happens. Nesting is primary to the female, and weight gain is only possible for storing the energy she will need to nest if someone other than herself is doing the hunting for food. That boy out there with the worm hanging out of his beak is about to share with his sweetie. I'm drawn to the couple presentation over bantam roosters doing everything with a pulse in the chicken pen. Give me a robin, any day. Marriage is 100 percent to me.

I was engaged to Sissy-Lynn from age six until I was fifteen when she got pregnant by a grown man her mom had her date from church. I was dead serious because the church put us together. She was not so dead serious or something. I never really knew. We had one date, doubling with my sister and her boyfriend when we were thirteen. We never kissed then. We finally did kiss about the only time life allowed us in a porch swing on a mutual friend's porch when she showed up on a date with a man she wasn't married to at age twenty. He did give us that minute. I remember thinking, so why did we wait? Not much made sense anymore. But I blame the church for waiting.

From age fifteen to age sixteen, I played the field. I went to a necking party at a girl named Beverly's house because a girl I was sweet on named Beany, I don't remember her last name, was her cousin. We sat in Beverly's basement and watched what was going on, and I remember asking Beany if she wanted to do that? She said no, and I was glad enough. We went outside and took a walk and held hands. And she was glad enough. I worked for a butcher and talked to a girl named Donna when she came into the store. She liked Mallow Cups, was from Florida, and lived in an old dilapidated building with exterior stairs that went up to her and her mother's apartment. Walking home after closing at eight o'clock, I would sit on the stairs and talk with Donna. I progressed to writing her letters that I would give to her on the way to work and that we would talk about after work. She moved back to Florida and gave me her address there, and I continued with the letters until I got a letter from her mother telling me to stop because Donna had got another boyfriend in Florida. So I did, and we never kissed—just held hands some.

I figured it was some failing on my part because I didn't know how to kiss a girl. I had had girlfriends at Summer Camp and at Vacation Bible School. And I knew some girls from working in the fields. But I had never kissed anybody. I asked my aunts about dating and kissing girls, and they gave me great advice, except they didn't date much. So I went to see this girl named Carol whom the boys had kissed, and I told her what was going on. She said, Well. What do you want from me? So I told her that this or that boy said she kissed them, and I'd like the same to learn how. So she told me the whole town had just dried up, and boys around there would run out of things to talk about pretty quick. And if she did kiss me, it would be over the fence we were standing on each side of because she finds me sort of weird. So I learned a lot about kissing from Carol and a lot about what you're not to do about kissing as well. Carol ended up marrying this guy I never would have guessed she would find interesting, who didn't know anything about girls. Go figure.

Evelyn heard what had happened between me and Carol and wasn't going to have it. Evelyn was three years older than me and went to our church and held Carol in low regard. She took me on herself as sort of a project and taught me how to neck in a car while everyone else was in church on Sunday evenings, including Sissy-Lynn with her ugly stupid husband who had beat the hell out of me for no reason except jealousy. Evelyn was crippled in one hip and never let that stop her. She was all about living life to the fullest and did so until she died at twenty years old. But somehow, this experience with Evelyn got my mother and her mother's heads together when Evelyn's sister Bernadette got dumped for a dance. It was arranged that I go with Bernadette and she would drive. What seemed a matchup set for failure ended up memorable because we did dance, and we did look nice together. And she did get to throw it right in the face of the guy who dumped her. So in her car, before I walked home, she did kiss me, and I kissed her right back. And she said, Well, Evelyn was right. You're some kisser. And I was fine with that from a junior when I was just a sophomore.

But I did kiss Pinky's daughter on a fan bus after that. I can't remember her name. Pinky had a store where kids bought candy, and she had bad cavities from always being around all that candy. Then she told her boyfriend, and he gave me a ration of shit in Shop Class that I didn't know until midfight what bug had got up his ass about me. I just didn't connect it at all and had just got my class ring and broke a big chip out of the setting hitting him in the teeth. Let me just say, he was at a table on the other side of the room with his friends from where I was with my friends. And he said about one thing, and I went over the tables and rode him down under his table and hit him and broke my ring. And that was it. Not much of a fight, and I was sneaking off every night to box with the black guys, so I knew how