In Absentia

News & A Story

Along the Canadian River, north of Pampa, after the Smoke House Creek Fire

Dear Readers of In Solitude, For Company:

I have been missing in action. Thank you for bearing with(out) me. I’m a firm believer that people don’t need more emails. I do not need another notification niggling my attention away from greater, dearer tasks. I’m sure you don’t either.

However, last week I drove up to Perryton, Texas—across the vast expanse of the largest wildfire in Texas history—to see my friend Ryan Culwell play a few songs in his hometown. It happens that I sat down, in real life, behind one of the people who regularly reads this newsletter and he said, “Hey, it’s been a while since you’ve posted your newsletter. I like reading those.” Then we listened to Ryan sing in a church that had been abandoned a few years ago. The church was moved from its original location to a museum in Perryton. The church was famous. Famous for a scarcely populated place anyway because it had a blue neon sign in the shape of a cross that read, “Jesus Saves.” Ryan’s dad told me that you could see the sign from Kansas, which in that flat part of the world, is only slightly an exaggeration. The sign was damaged in the tornado last spring, and now it reads, “aves.” Here are a few pictures I took this week driving around the Panhandle, mostly north of Pampa.

News

I’ve joined a podcast with a couple of friends, called The Color of Dust. It’s hosted here on Substack, so you could slide on over and subscribe if you like. The other two fellas are Jack Baumgartner, an artist-farmer in Kansas, and Sam Kee, a pastor-turned-machinist in Illinois. One of our central themes is “Can Art be a way to practice Faith?” The Color of Dust title comes from Jack’s comment that painting is simply moving colored dust around on a surface, but somehow it transcends its elements and magic springs forth. Add to that the notion that we all are dust, and our lives are merely dust being moved around. And yet. Perhaps that appeals to you.

A Story

A couple of years ago,

Casie Dodd

at Belle Point Press published my story Plaster Madonna in the Mid/South Anthology. Eventually she nominated it for a Pushcart Prize, for which I’m grateful. Belle Point has been operating as a regional independent press. I think regional presses are necessary for a healthy culture. Why import all of our stories from a couple of metropoli, when there are plenty of capable storytellers right where we’re from? If you’ve been reading this newsletter for any amount of time, you’ll know why I think that. I’m presenting it here for all of you while I gather my thoughts for future newsletters. The story takes about 30 minutes to read, but I’ve attached an audio version if you’d rather listen to me read it in my early morning voice before my kids wake up.

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Plaster Madonna

A week after the fire, Paul lurked through the ruins of the farmhouse with a black garbage bag to collect any objects of memory. In the kitchen, where he’d dragged his mother’s body from the flames, the table bowed on three legs towards the window. Dishes had spilled in shattered heaps from the scorched cabinets. He scraped plate shards from the bubbled countertop until he found a small statue of the Virgin Mary, mostly intact, and perched it on the windowsill. He peered into her face. 

“Virgin of virgins, Mary Our Mother,” he said. Her plaster pupils surveyed the soot-blackened ceiling, sagging from the work of the firefighters’ hoses. A spiderweb of fractures ringed the base of the Virgin’s neck. Paul swigged from a flask of vodka, then spit on his thumb and rubbed soot from the statue’s cracks. Yellow glue like a scarf around her throat revealed previous reconciliations of her head to her body. “How many times did we knock off your head?” he said.

He was nine, the first time he remembered. He and his older brother, Mike, a stuttering fourteen-year-old were clearing the dinner table. Their parents had gone out to the dairy barn for the evening milking. 

“D-do the d-d-dishes,” Mike said. 

“D-d-do w-w-what, d-d-dummy?” Paul replied. 

Mike shoved Paul to the floor and clamped his elbows to the linoleum. He began hammering his sternum with a knuckle. Then Mike hawked up phlegm and dribbled a globule between his lips, the pendula of mucus spinning thinner with each movement, arcing and swinging and dropped it into Paul’s open mouth. Paul gasped as the spit plopped heavily down the back of his throat, the milky phlegm sucking straight down his windpipe. Mike howled and got up.

Paul rose, coughing and attacked his brother, aiming to kill him. They lurched into the countertop and clipped the statue. The Virgin’s head popped off when she hit the Formica counter. 

“L-l-l-look what you d-d-did,” said Mike. 

Paul’s knees buckled at the sight of the decapitated icon, and his cheeks burned. Tears welled, and the kitchen blurred. He caught himself against the kitchen table where his hand happened onto a fork. He gripped it and swung, missing Mike over and over. There was no thought in any of this, simply the target for his anger. Paul squared his feet and hurled the fork, which sliced past Mike’s ear and stuck in the wall next to the window. They stared at the resonating fork.

Mike departed wordlessly, leaving Paul to pull the fork out of the wall and clean up the broken saint. In their father John’s workshop, Paul found wood glue, and he reset the broken Virgin’s head, hailing her mercy. He promised that he would become a priest if she forgave him his rage. At the workbench, he also found his father’s bottle of homemade peach brandy. He’d tasted it before when John pulled it from the still, but it had burned then and it felt like a trick his father played on him. This time, he took a large swallow without even trying to taste it, and then pursed his lips. 

It burned in his throat like a belch with barbs, but he determined to keep his mouth shut. The fire bloomed in his cheeks and tears dripped from his eyes. The alcohol leaked into his blood and then each of his limbs and fingers called out, but he would not open his mouth. The impotence he’d felt fighting his brother, and the rage that led him to attempt murder wasn’t an emotion for which he had words. He didn’t understand how he lost control, or the shame that came with it. But this heat, a flagellation of his cells, became a shape for that feeling, and it was something that could be contained inside his skin.

When the glue dried, he returned the poorly restored Mary to her perch in the kitchen window, but each evening for a month he worried that his parents would notice her broken neck as the family gathered around with rosary beads. Chanting their prayers to the saint: Remember, O most gracious Virgin Mary that no one who has sought thine intercession was left unaided... 

They never noticed though, or at least never mentioned it. Mike never brought it up. Paul was too afraid to confess. Left unacknowledged, his guilt turned to dread and fermented in his chest. He felt it expand like a trapped vapor with no release.

Now forty years later, in the burned house, he dug a thumbnail into the charred window frame. Ash swirled and stung his throat. He held his breath and finished the prayer from his memory: I fly unto thee, O Virgin of virgins, my mother; to thee do I come, before thee I stand, sinful and sorrowful...

He found the four holes where the fork had stuck and touched the punctures. Three styles of wallpaper had been hung over these holes since he’d thrown the fork, and each layer burned and peeled away in the fire. His hand fell from the wall, and he touched the statue’s face. He gripped her around the body like a bottle of wine, or like a bell, and left the ruined house and drove west through the pasture toward his own home. Cattle bearing his brother’s brand trotted up to the car. The brand was an M with a P like a flag waving from the M’s leg. At one time, the brothers had shared the brand, but Mike had forced him out of the partnership. There hadn’t been an argument because Mike didn’t like to talk. Only an accumulation of unspoken and therefore unmet expectations, and then it was over. It took Paul by surprise, and he was powerless to change Mike’s mind. When he attempted to reason with him, Mike brought up Paul’s drinking. 

“You drink as much as I do,” Paul said.

“Not l-l-like you do,” Mike replied.

So Mike bought him out and kept the brand.

Cattle crowded around him as he unhooked the gate that separated their properties.

“I don’t have any hay,” he said. He held out his hand and one of the red Limousin heifers stretched her neck and sniffed him, and he touched the top of her nose until she allowed him to sidle to her. He patted her neck. “You’re a beauty,” he whispered into her ear. “Mike’s doing something right.”

He drained his flask, tonguing the last drop, and stumbled into his car. Leaving the gate unlatched behind him, he drove down the farm-to-market road to his house, ready to settle in for the night. 

His wife, Louise, was not home when he opened the front door. He fished around his memory to remember where she said she’d be, but their last conversation had slipped. He set to work measuring coffee into the filter. 

He leaned over the sink and scanned east across the plains, finding the burnt house two miles away on the horizon. The elm trees that surrounded the house had burned to spindly stumps. His father planted those trees in 1942 before he was drafted. 

Now in this autumn light, the charred trees seemed to Paul as the slag droplets showering from the lightning of his father’s welder, splattering and cooling into tiny black branches. Paul filled his sink with soapy water and scrubbed the statue of the Virgin Mary and wrapped her in a towel to dry. 

His coffeemaker gurgled and steamed the last drops of hard water in the machine. From the cupboard, he retrieved a white mug with a chipped rim, the only surviving member of the dish settings he and his wife had received for their wedding. He sought this cup over other cups, running a finger around the various rims until he found the chipped ceramic. 

He filled it halfway with coffee, then reached under the sink behind the basket of cleaning supplies for an unlabeled spray bottle, a third filled with a clear liquid. He unscrewed the spray mechanism and filled his mug to the brim and slurped a skim from the surface and held his breath as the alcohol seeped into his chest. His exhale then described the currents of the coffee-warmed spirits.

At the table, he unwrapped the icon. A single piece of white plaster. Hair as white as skin as white as robes. He thumbed the yellow crack in her neck and tried to decipher the turn of her lips. The ambiguity of her smile dislodged a memory.

He was five. He sat in the front pew of St. Mary’s Catholic Church, the parish in which he’d been baptized, gazing at a mural of Mary above the altar. He was alone in the sanctuary, waiting on his father who was in confession. Tiny cherubim—round cheeked and locks curled— lifted Mary into heaven. Her white robes swathed in the gold of the surrounding sky. A gold scarf and pink belt, a blue sash billowing like sheets on the line. Lips like rose petals. Her hand extended into the sanctuary beckoning Paul, and her blue eyes regarded the ceiling, so he craned his neck to see her view, and he found a fracture in the ceiling plaster. Was it joy with which she watched the crack? Or worry? Or doubt? Would the crack suddenly grow and ruin the ceiling down on his head? Or did she expect heaven to descend through the break and accommodate the boy in this pew? He grew frightened of either outcome and jumped from his seat to search for his father in the confessional booth. 

John’s voice leaked through the wicker-pleated dividers, his father speaking in the confessional like he spoke in the shop, as if his words were meted cuts in steel used in the manufacture of a larger implement.

“I killed a boy,” said his father. “In Italy. One of ours. His guts were out. Nobody could fix that. He would’ve died in a few minutes. But he was screaming and Nazis were crawling in the rocks. I needed to hide. I put my hands over his face until I couldn’t feel his breath.”

“In war…” began the priest.

Paul placed Saint Mary on his kitchen table. “Why am I remembering this now?” he asked her, then took another drink and filled the cup again from the cleaning bottle. He covered his eyes and tried to remember what the priest had prescribed for penance, but the memory ended at his father’s confession. His hand trembled in the handle of the mug.

At 8:40, after half-an-hour of drinking at the table, he heard his wife open the back door. He quickly screwed the top back on the spray bottle. Without acknowledging him, she swung open the cupboard. The cups clinked as she chose one. Her gray hair was bound into a ponytail that hung down her back. She didn’t turn to face him.

“Where were you?” he asked.

“I told you I was going to help Roxanne put up cowpeas.”

“You told me? When?” His tone wasn’t as tactful as he had hoped, and she faced him now.

“You were at the desk, looking at your mom’s bank files.”

“You can’t expect me to remember that.”

“I don’t expect you to remember much anymore,” she said.

He saw her eyeing the spray bottle.

“Were you cleaning?” she asked.

“The coffeemaker is backed up. I wanted to run some vinegar through after we finish that pot.” He shook the bottle. “But it’s empty.” 

He looked at the clock. Eight-forty-five. She poured her cup in the sink without having taken a drink and left the kitchen. Her bedroom door rattled on the other side of the house while he looked out the window. 

Paul had decided to marry Louise when they were seventeen, on the night they snuck wine into a drive-in to see Cool Hand Luke. By the time Lucille the Blonde washed her car and taunted the prisoners, Louise was laying down across the bench seat, and they had to stop to move the gear shift out of the way. His head was fuzzy from the wine, and his focus lagged between senses. Taste mingled with smell in their heavy breathing. Fingers felt inadequate for touch. Her body flickered a pale blue as the projector illuminated the windshield, and the movie manipulated her expressions. Was she ecstatic or angry or in pain? 

Afterward, he didn’t know what to say. They buttoned their clothes, though they had only been half-undressed, and he held her. They began to sober up as Paul Newman play a song on the banjo. He didn’t understand what was happening in the movie, but he knew it was sad. Louise wiped a tear. 

  “What happened?” he asked.

  “That was my first time.” 

  Paul Newman cried and played the song faster. Get yourself a sweet Madonna....

“I’d put you on a pedestal, my sweet Madonna” he said. She turned to him, incredulously. He suddenly understood what she meant by her first time. “Oh,” he said, “It was mine, too.” They decided to leave the movie when the prison guard put Luke in the box again.

He whistled the song as he drove home along the farm-to-market roads. Twenty minutes after he’d dropped off Louise, he could still smell her in his clothes. He breathed deep the scent, thinking he’d marry her and that he’d tell his parents when he got home. 

His mother sat at the kitchen table in her nightgown with a glass of peach brandy. 

“Grab another glass,” she said.

He slid the glass to her, and she tipped a dram of her brandy into his. 

“This batch is good,” he said.

“It was a good year for peaches.”

“Why are you up?”

“Waiting on you,” she said.

“You worried I’m dead somewhere?”

“I’m your mother. I worry about your whole life. All of it.”

“I’m alive. You can stop worrying.”

She thumbed a drip from the side of her glass and touched her tongue. “Do you know how my father met my step-mother?” 

“She was a mail order bride from Schulenberg.”

“There’s more than that,” she said. “My mother died.”

“From gangrene, I know. She had a Caesarean when Uncle Harvey was born.”

“Yes. Papa had five kids and no wife. I was seven, the oldest.” 

He sipped his brandyand nodded. She continued. “Us kids all got chores to keep the farm running. Little Eddie would get the eggs. Had to carry a stick to hit the rooster with.”

“What was your job?”

“One of my jobs was to tend the corn mash.”

“When you were seven?”

“It only had to be kept warm and stirred. It wasn’t hard.”

“Is that how you learned to make brandy?” 

“Everybody could make spirits back then. No one looked down on it. Just another part of a farm. When Prohibition passed, Papa distilled twenty or thirty gallons a week. Too much, probably. The law came around. But he had five kids that he couldn’t take into the field while he plowed, so he stayed close to the house to make moonshine.

“In August of ’27, I was feeding leftover mash to the chickens, and the sheriff stopped by. I didn’t see him, so I couldn’t ring the dinner bell as a warning. He wanted a cut of the proceeds. But he told the papers he was doing the work of God and Calvin Coolidge. He arrested Papa right there, with Harvey in diapers, the rest of us crying.”

“Papa went to jail? I didn’t know that.”

“Not jail. He went to prison. Huntsville, five hundred miles from here. The Batenhorsts took us in for six months.”

“How’d he get out?” Paul asked, sipping.

“He got his case in front of the governor. Ma Ferguson pardoned him.”

“They pardoned him for making moonshine?”

“For selling it. When he got out, he had no way to get back up here, but his sister lived in Schulenberg, which was a couple of hours from Huntsville. He stayed with them for a few weeks, and when he came home I had a step-mother.”

“Where’d they meet?”

“Church. They knew each other for two weeks. You can love anyone. Papa was not an easy man, but she loved him. And she was a good mother to us.”

“Did you stay awake to tell me this story?” he asked.

“You can love anyone.”

“I do love someone.”

“You feel a lot for this girl?”

“Louise.”

“What?”

“Her name is Louise. And I want to marry her.” He drank the rest of the glass and allowed the heat to bring pain. Then he filled the glass again.

She tapped her fingernails on her tumbler. Her fingers were crooked from years of milking cows and quilting.

She glanced at the statue of Mary on the windowsill, and he followed her eyes.

“When did you break the Virgin?”

He tried to appear shocked, but he knew he was caught.

“When I was nine.”

“When you were nine?” she said. “When you wanted to be a priest?”

He glanced at the statue of Mary.

“I was nine. I said some things I didn’t mean.”

“You lied?”

“I didn’t know what being a priest would mean. Who holds a nine-year-old to his word?”

“But you’re seventeen. Do you know now what it means to keep your word, to vow?”

“Did you know, when you were twenty-one? Dad asked you to be his wife before he left for the war. What did y’all know?” 

“We knew what it meant to say something and mean it.” She drank the rest of her brandy in a swig. “You can love anyone, now,” she said. “In the future, then you can only love one person.” She slid the empty glass over to him.

He tapped his chipped coffee mug with his wedding ring. “Now you know,” he said to the memory. “Now you know. Not then.” The vodka’s legs descended in the empty cleaning bottle. He heard Louise hanging clothes in her closet. The clock’s second-hand rounded the six. 

Eight-forty-seven. 

He stood and gulped the entire cup, swooning at the apex and set the mug down, catching half its base on the table. It tipped, and he swiped and caught the handle. The cup skittered across the table and disappeared over the edge. The sound of breaking porcelain took his breath. He fled the house.

A dull layer of gray floated like dregs on the horizon as he careened onto the farm-to-market highway. Darkness had fallen, and the white line on the shoulder shimmered as if beneath waters, refusing to focus, falling from his view. “Going ninety, I aint scary, cuz I got…,” he sang. 

He rubbed his eyes and still the highway retreated, so he shook his head and blinked his eyes hard and when he opened them, there stood a red Limousin heifer in the road. The noise engulfed him: safety glass blasted into a plastic suspension, sheet metal crushed and ripped at joints, an open-door warning tone chimed. The engine continued to run.

The heifer bawled at eight-fifty-one.

The door was jammed. He pushed against it with his shoulder. The metal creaked. He leaned over the center console and kicked at the door and it moved enough that he could squeeze through. Once out, he yanked on the door until the hinges bent open. The cow lay on the crumpled hood, lowing. He walked around her and discovered her ruptured belly, and her mangled legs. He glanced towards the lighted sign at Vince’s Liquor, a half-mile away.

In the trunk, he found a tire iron and tested the weight in his hand and stumbled back to the cow. Slobber and blood strung from her mouth as he set the iron between her eyes. He pummeled her in the forehead and the tool rang in his hand, but the cow didn’t flinch, only kept breathing. He swung again. This time the cow screamed a long syllable that broke into an asslike bray and trembled in his chest. The bellowing continued and he covered his ears, but he could not escape the liquid, gasping screams, and he screamed back at her to die and swung the iron again without effect and finally he fled to the trunk. 

He uncovered a box of black garbage bags tucked behind the wheel well and shook one out and held it next to her head and spit. Then, sliding the bag over her bawling face, he pulled it tight and hugged her around the neck, his hands around her windpipe. The muscles and cartilage clambered against his fingers as she screamed in the bag, but the sounds became quieter and then ended and the breathing, too, finally stopped.

When she finished trembling, he realized the hoarseness of his voice as he’d screamed with her, he realized the tack of her blood coating his hands, his fingers, and he shook them violently, six, seven times until he could no longer hear the splatter on the road and wiped more blood on his jeans. Then he grabbed her tail and pried, but the busted hood held her like a cup. “Could I burn you?” he asked. “No, that’s stupid,” he answered.

He kicked the collapsed bumper and hunched over to catch his breath, the alcohol stuck between his stomach and lungs with the familiar barbs. When he stood, he considered the cow still lodged on his idling vehicle and the half-mile to the store. A taste emerged on his tongue, a dry paste of thirst. 

“What in God’s name are you doing, Paul?” he asked. The film of blood crusted in the grain of his hands and thread of his pants reflected pink in the single headlight. More blood and cud plopped from her torn stomachs at his feet. The front end of the car drooped under the weight of the carcass.

He returned to the driver’s seat and slid the gearshift into drive and the car blundered forward and he smiled at the cobweb of a windshield. Then the remaining headlight flickered and died. He attempted the electric window but the motor only whined. He stepped out and searched for the light at the store and pulled his hair. He noticed a change in the air: humidity, a storm springing up in the night. The breeze came from the east like a ghost’s breath on his follicles. Lightning spoke by sign between the clouds, and at his feet a noise like a stream. Over the clicking of the engine, he heard water running in the bar ditch.

The county dredged these ditches eight-feet-deep to channel irrigation water away from the road. He got in the car and left the door open and inched over to the ditch until the nose of the car began to plunge down the decline, and he slammed the brakes. The carcass heaved but settled back onto the hood. He backed up and tried again with more speed. The steering wheel jerked when the front tires dug into the ditchwall and the heifer tipped and slid off. She disappeared into the kochia weeds. He backed onto the road and found the store’s light as it winked out, leaving him alone on the dark highway in a flickering favor of dashboard light. “Go home and drink water,” he said.

Weaving from ditch to ditch, he reversed the half-mile back to his house and left the car in the driveway. The first drops of rain fell on him as he stole back to the house. In the kitchen, he washed his hands and swept the pieces of the mug, attempting to piece together the larger shards in the dust pan, but realized most of the remains were simply dust, so he dumped them in the trash under the sink. 

He looked out the window in the direction of the house in which he’d been raised but which no longer existed. The glass reflected his kitchen lights, and he found himself in the gaze of Mary Our Mother, standing behind her, and before her in the glass, the night uncoiling in the flashing light of the late rains. The remains of his childhood house silhouetted in the lightning as if light were pouring through the bead.

His wife entered the frame of glass. He lifted the statue in salutation, and he turned to face her.

“I broke her,” he said. “When I was a kid. I was angry”

“Where’d you go?” she asked. 

He motioned her to follow him to the empty troves around the house: the top, unused cabinet in his bathroom; the crawl space under the closet; a freezer bag of clear slush behind a box of frozen corndogs. “I hide vodka,” he said. “I ran out tonight, and I went to get more.”

“Why are you telling me this?” she asked.

“I want. I want to stop drinking.”

“I’ve been telling you that for a long time.”

He took a deep breath and stuttered that he loved her. “N-now,” he said. “I love you now. I’m so angry. I’ve always been so angry.”

“I might leave tomorrow,” she said.

He breathed in.

Their silence extended like an exhale compressing more and more deeply until the breather grows dizzy. The lightbulbs incandesced across her countenance, her face framed in graying hair like a veil pulled back, revealing her pale mouth.

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Thanks for the company.