Saturday, December 19, 2009

EMMETSBURG: Three

Midnight blue. The storm was all but spent now. It lifted like a veil from the night. Bright white flashes on the tilting horizon silhouetted a tree line at the end of his property and a distant barn, reminding him of France and distant artillery duels. The barn was turned so that he could see directly through the open doors at either end, like an escape through this world into another. It left the yard strewn with branches, and torn sheets of tar paper from the roof. Anna pulled away slowly, holding on to his hand. She tugged at it lightly.

“Come to bed,” her voice was laced with reluctant desire. “We’ll get a new perspective on things in the morning.”

At the bedroom door she lifted away her gown and let it fall to the floor. John smiled, for not a moment before he’d had a strange sense, a feeling that the moments he was living now were as memories, as if they had already happened. At the bedroom door John took in her nakedness. She lay across the bed, her arms stretched above her head, accentuating full breasts, shone white and perfect in the darkness. Anna’s nipples were round and swollen. Her hair was thrown across the pillow. The room was suddenly filled with the scent of her sex. It beckoned him to her.

John slipped from his shorts and climbed up over her, hovering there momentarily, as though he was floating above some intensely desirable landscape; as if he was a banished native to that land coming home after so long. As she opened herself to him Anna reached up and touched his face.

Her expression was encyclopedic. There was desire to be sure, but more than that there was the deepest sadness. Her eyes were the deepest of dark pools, and John could not be certain if that sadness was more for her or for him. Her thighs caressed his flanks. He hesitated at her gaze. It was almost too much for him.

“Are you sure?” he whispered.

She nodded, her eyes filled more with resolve than anything else. “Come into me, John.”

He found her and teased her lightly, delighting as she pulled eagerly at his hips. Her breath was warm. Anna brought her lips to his ear and pulled at his hips, imploring him to fill her. A sigh escaped her as he pressed himself tightly to her. She wrapped her legs tightly around his waist and whispered softly to him.

“Oh, John, I missed you.”

They made love for what seemed an eternity, erasing the world outside; the storm, sirens across town, the rattle of an old truck as it sped down Pleasant Street.. The rain came in fits and starts. The storm’s power, its melancholy and passion fully reflected in their lovemaking, as though it was a symphony to their dance. Finished, John and Anna lay beside one another staring at the ceiling. Their breaths thundered in the room, their bodies glistening from their sudden and unexpected expressions for one another.

Bluish flashes of lightening were distant now, the thunder barely audible. John looked over at Anna and thought to say something. There were tears in her eyes. He knew what they were for. A sorrowful moan almost escaped him. Sleep came quickly and as a blessing.

Thursday, December 17, 2009

EMMETSBURG: Two

Anna felt his worry. She turned to him as the first fat rain drops patted against the front of the house. He could feel her looking at him. For a moment they were both silent. He reached over and pulled the window shut. Instantly the heat rose in the room.

“John?”

“Go back to sleep?” he said quietly.

“What is it?” she asked, touching his bare shoulder.

He didn’t wish to worry her and frowned over thoughts refusing to form themselves into proper sentences.

“It’s nothing. Get some sleep.”

With a blinding flash of lightening, thunder, like a rumbling kettledrum, shook the world. John’s heart skipped a beat. Anna pulled closer, her warm breath at his neck. Her gasp was lost to the racket of a sudden spectacular downpour.

“Worried for the roof?” she asked. She ran a hand across his strong chest.

“Some,” he said.

He was worried for the roof, worried for the truck, for Anna and the prospect of not going back to work any time soon. He worried over the banks and all those who had lost hope along with their homes, and he worried for a world whose governments always saw the simple way out of their population’s discontent and disillusionment through war. He could feel it out there somewhere, rising as a certain tension in the world. And tensions had either to be relieved or they broke altogether. And John feared the world seemed to be coming to one hell of a break up.

John turned his head and found her hazel eyes in the dark. He said the only thing he could have said to her. The only thing his ego would permit. “Be fine.”

She pulled him closer and he suddenly felt trapped there. John’s heart thudded madly, as though about to burst from his chest. He was already sliding sideways out of bed, pulling gingerly away from her.


“Be back,” he said.

In just shorts John pushed his feet into a pair of old brown slippers. Anna didn’t protest. She watched as he left the room and crossed the small dining room to the kitchen door. He pushed open the back screen and a gust of wind tore it from his hands. The sound of it banging against the house was lost to the roaring waves of rain. Water already stood deep in the yard, with waves whipped and sheared by the wind.

Anna sat up, her feet still covered beneath her late mother’s heavy quilt. She swept back a lock of long Irish-red hair and studied him as if he was a strange animal, at once wild and beautiful in its power. It was like those pictures of great male lions from the National Geographic. The fight had long ago gone out of them though they still projected awesome strength.

John’s shoulders were broad and strong. His wavy brown hair brushed with the pewter evidence of hard years and great disappointment. He was no longer the bright-eyed boy she waved goodbye to as he went off to join Pershing in Europe. He was every bit the man who returned to her darker for that year at war.

He was silhouetted in the door against the silvery blue downpour like some dejected mythical hero. One arm was upraised, a hardened and calloused hand pressed to the frame. But the lightening, that immense and constant lightening threw his shadow in snapshot moments across the floor, making him appear all the more tragic and lonesome. There came the flat tap-tap-tapping of water falling upon kitchen tiles behind him. Anna watched with a measure of sympathy and understanding as her big man sighed heavily at the sound and looked skyward.

Anna loved him. She loved him more than he could ever realize. She loved that enduring energy, the stalwart refusal to quit, to quit her and to quit this life where lesser men might have given up. She loved that quality which compelled him to remain in the fight when all conscious faculties might have convinced him of its futility. It drew Anna from bed.

She paused in the dining room. There was hardly enough room for the old oak table and four heavy chairs. Let alone the Franklin sewing machine, where Anna hired out her services to help make ends meet. The lace-white curtains over the window were pulled tight. Beside the window a trickle of water ran along the wall past an oval framed photograph of her parents, taken just after landing in America. The couple looked ancient, and part of a very different world than they would leave for their only daughter.

Anna went to John, wrapping her arms around his body and pressing her cheek against the cool flesh of his bare back. She breathed him, suddenly and completely aroused by his scent. She moaned softly and listened to the steady thudding of his heart.

“Bad storm,” he said quietly. A flash of lightening brought a sharp and quick boom from somewhere across town. It was of a much different character than the thunder.

“Been worse,” she softly kissed his back.

He was a man of so very few words, but each was supported by deeply resonating thoughts. The words he chose so sparingly truly meant something.

“Gets so fighting even the little ones is too much anymore.”

She was quiet a long moment, and was suddenly fearful that he might slip away from her. “John Perkins, don’t you quit on me.”

He mulled over the words and held a hand out to the rain. It was cool and perfect. There was something about the rain. It had a power, as though the true character of the storm resided in the collaboration of each of those myriad drops. He thought about the waste of the European War and wondered why men of good conscience failed to rally as those myriad drops.

The rain let up just a little, and was already turning the long garden troughs into little canals. Already he was figuring a way to fix the roof, and would keep at that roof as long as he still had the breath and strength to do so. John managed a smile and touched her arm.

“Too dumb to quit.”

Wednesday, December 16, 2009

EMMETSBURG:Part One

We are storms and banks and reeds
Whipped by the wind we rise to bluster and succumb to our own floods
We are fear and desperation and pointlessness
Cold we huddle for fear of being forgotten, yet that is our fate.
We are hope and need and desire
Dragged from our homes with cries lost to the tumult of the world
We are tragedy and sickness and alone.
And if there is any redemption left to us it lies in the sacrifice of love











Silver. The leaves of Oak and Maple trees across Pleasant Street turned over in anticipation of the rain. In the moonlight, before that light was obliterated by storm clouds, the leaves shone polished and ghostly against the midnight sky. From the semi-consciousness of a restless sleep John was vaguely aware of the approaching storm. It came at first as a sudden gust pushing the long branches of the old willow out front against the small white wood frame house. The wind was scented with rain and cool, breaking a string of broiling days that had taken hold of Northwest Iowa.

There hadn’t been a drop of rain in nearly a month. There had been that sudden all too brief downpour just as church was letting out the week before, but not enough to help crops withering in the fields. But for scattering the usual social congregations on the steps of the old Saint Mary’s church, it dried almost before hitting the ground. Soaked a few folks caused Mabel Conlon to take a spill down the steps of the church. Mabel is a large woman though and, but for a possible bruised bottom-which only Mister Conlon could verify, she could only lay claim to an injured ego.

A few counties over some cows had come up sick. The government had sent out inspectors to make tests with the authority to condemn whole herds if need be. It would be a disaster for a family to lose a herd (pennies on the Dollar was as good as a loss). In times such as this it was, well, a declaration of war on decent salt of the earth folks. It was only a matter of time before it brought good men to the end of their rope, and showed conniving men for their darkest character.

The cost of everything had gone up, while paychecks went down. Banks called in bad debts from folks with no means to pay those debts. Those banks foreclosed and threw good god-fearing people off their land and out of their homes, then closed their own doors for good. Other families didn’t bother to wait for the bank to call in their notes, and overnight packed up and left Iowa forever. Every day brought some new insult, some new weight around the neck of a struggling economy that was, in the end, not international bankers and corporations and industry but millions of men and women toiling and bleeding and dying for their god-given right to carve out a small plot of this earth.

John sighed heavily and turned towards the window. He’d seen all this coming. This great slump, as it had come to be called, didn’t happen overnight. Nothing happened overnight, except to fools and those fighting desperately to fend the constant indignities of being down and out. John had seen this coming, at least as much as an average working Joe could. Maybe it was the war that had opened his eyes, or darkened them enough to see how fragile and arrogant the veneer of civilization was. He eschewed the allure and temptation of debt. It meant that he and Ana had to go without during the spend and boom years of the Twenties, but they had a roof over their heads and a chance to weather this better than most.

Anna was beside him. Her buttocks were warm through the thin cotton fabric of her gown he’d bought her last Christmas for a buck and change from the Sears & Roebuck’s catalog. She was breathing rhythmically, her lips fluttering ever so slightly. For a moment it built, disturbing his sudden onslaught of thoughts and worries and memories. John reached back and ran a hand across her hip and stilled her somewhat. It was the first decent sleep she’d had since, well, in some time anyway. That thought led him invariably to a place he preferred not to be.

It was best not to dwell on such things, force them from the mind and get on with living. Of course it was easier for a man than a woman. Men are so much farther from the body. They are ego drenched in misgivings, but they by force or by necessity buried those misgivings deep. They buried them deep enough that it takes a lifetime for them to resurface again. Women, by contrast were worry vainly longing for lost innocence. Theirs was an ill-defined ideal alternately negotiated with or abandoned to men.

There was something more though, something that John struggled to fathom. It was that marital rhythms came more naturally to women. She knew his secrets, while he could barely come to terms with them himself. She knew desires and thoughts he endeavored to keep for himself. It was that which made him desire and despise and long for her and run from her all at once. It was that which kept him at her side while wishing for the far horizon.

“Oh,” he sighed, exhausted. It came as a trembling breath that escaped him almost without knowing. It was a lament. It was a lament over life and all its many burdens. It fell like a weight on his chest, and protested the purpose of existence at all. His thoughts led inevitably to some end, with the realization that the precious nature of each life was alternately a definition of its ultimate futility. It was a thought that reflected the tragedy of the past several months and of a growing cynicism that engulfed him like a cancer.

Sleep fell away from him now, like metal shavings on a concrete floor. Sleep gave way to primal stirrings and more rational worries over the tarpaper roof he’d put on the summer before. It had taken the worst Iowa winters could muster, holding on by hardly more than a wish. But John could sense this storm was something more. He could feel its power as it fell upon little Emmetsburg, and knew it would be a hard night. What he couldn’t know was how this single storm would call into question everything in his life, and even life itself.

Emmetsburg

Emmetsburg

A novel of the Great Depression

By

W.C. Turck


Exclusively
on
BLOGSPOT

Copyright W.C.Turck 2009

Tuesday, December 15, 2009

THE LAST MAN: Epilogue

The sea is a mirror of the burnt orange sky, hardly disturbed by the wake of our little boat. It lops lazy and hollow against the old wooden hull. Behind us the sounds and images of war are distant and low. I stopped rowing sometime ago, content to drift for a while and not cause any more noise in the world than absolutely necessary. The scent fills me, and will forever remain wedded to these first hours of freedom.

The wind has stopped, the crisp cool air salty and sweet. It is as still as that painted sea. Desiree is asleep and curled in the bow beneath a crudely sewn blanket. I wish that I could say it is a peaceful sleep. More accurately it is an exhausted sleep haunted by all she has been through. None of this was hers by choice. She is so perfect there, and for the first time I am truly happy. I am sunbeams through the clouds. I am hope and I am nearly saved.

Is this some sort of victory? Have I won anything? If freedom is the only measure then I have won everything. However, if escape remains the measure then a man must know what he is escaping to as intimately of what he is escaping to, with full understanding that he may never escape himself. I am settled and at peace for the moment, but with the understanding that the world is moving to something. The world is always moving to something, some final accounting, a cataclysm, and a sum total of all that has come before. What form it will take is impossible to say. Nor can I say whether it will come with a whisper or a like a storm.
The boat drifts invariably towards the ruins, floating among massive pylons supporting iron and concrete platforms high above the sea. They are terrific and large, like great rusting sea monsters frozen in a time long passed. Among them the air is funneled to create its own wind, which tugs as great cables. The wind whispers and whistles through the ancient structures. Desiree wakes with a start as I steer the boat close to one of the structures. Her eyes go wide as we pass beneath the first platform, neck straining at its towering superstructure. I stretch a hand and let it brush along the massive concrete support. A rush of excitement sets me to light and sends a shiver through me.

It is clear they are long deserted, perhaps for centuries. The flames I spied from my flat, the fires I dreamed and fantasized over for so long was merely the sun reflecting off broken window. The movements I believed were people like me, upon whom I weighted all my hopes were birds or tattered fabric pushed and pulled by the wind.

There is a small dock below the structure. It is rusted and bent by centuries of storms. One end is underwater, the rich brown rust, like the overlapping blossoms of some ravenous ivy patiently dissolving and devouring the platforms covers the platform. A metal sign hangs at an odd angle by a second chain above the platform. Like the dock it too is steadily being devoured by rust and salty sea water until almost nothing of it can be read. I can make out only a hand full of words, but they mean nothing to me. I mouth their sound. Desiree says them aloud.

SHELL OIL
All Visitors Must…

I use the oar to push away from the platform and guide the boat into the open sea. What lies beyond the far horizon is impossible to say. I remain hope, and I remain hope for Desiree. In those dark hours when I am without I will stand if only to be that hope for her. What else is there? As for freedom, I know now it is not some distant land or some castle to conquer. It is not me and it is not mine. It is not fleeting as a storm, nor it is anything a man can ever retreat from once it has been tasted. It is a bittersweet fruit whose taste is unknown yet familiar to the man who has never known it, and the harvest plundered and wasted by the man who has never been deprived. It is a breath of life; fully mine one moment and gone the next…


THE END

Monday, December 14, 2009

THE LAST MAN: Part Forty-three

A burst of fire from the armored transport takes the corner off the building beside me. The chest thudding concussion of those heavy rounds knock me to the ground. Chunks and pieces of building rain down around me. I roll to one side as another volley chews the pavement where I was laying to pieces.

Cut in a dozen places and disoriented from fright and fire, it is all I can do to scramble and tumble from the street into the relative cover of the alley. Desiree is running towards me. Out in the street resistance by loyal Corporation troops has completely collapsed. Their ranks are either scattered or killed. Virtually all of the shooting comes now from troops loyal to the Ministers. I still cannot find my feet when Desiree falls to her knees and into in my arms.

“You’re hurt,” she says, wiping a trickle of blood from a cut to my cheek.

“I’m fine,” I say. She settles me, brings a focus and a purpose I almost lost in fear. Behind us, at the top of the alley a soldier draws a bead on us. We are already up and running for the sewers. A burst from the Corporation side cuts the man in half. Bullets sail wildly around us in the man’s final dying spasm.

The entrance to the sewer is raised perhaps eighteen inches above the alley. Just inside there is a small concrete lip. There is a Sentinel, whose blue shell offers something of a hand hold. A waning afternoon light falls dimly to swirling brown water below. It is far too much of a drop for Desiree alone, but leaving her exposed in the alley. The armored transport draws to a stop. Its heavy turret turns slowly in our direction.

“I don’t think they’ve seen us yet,” I say. Fear thunders in my chest and in my ears. Soldiers appear from behind the transport, edging cautiously into the alley.

“It’s too far, I can’t make it!” she exclaims.

The soldiers spot us. The first shots slap impotently off the lip of the sewer entrance. The transport opens up a moment later, smashing fist size holes in the seawall above our heads.

“We’ll go over together,” I tell her, shouting above the gunfire. “Hold tight to me!”

Desiree and I slip over the edge as another volley from the transport blasts the wall to pieces. For a moment we swing in space. I have an arm around the broken Sentinel, the other holding precariously to Desiree. Hers are wrapped around my waist, but her grasp is already failing.

“Climb down my body and drop down!” I shout, but it is already too late. Her hold fails and with a scream she drops into the churning water. An instant later the Sentinel breaks loose and I am falling.

The water is deeper than I expected, cushioning our falls. It is muddy and filled with debris obviously loosed by the destruction of the Reclamation Center. Coming to my feet I find it almost chest deep and powerfully swift. Desiree is nowhere to be seen. It takes my eyes a moment to adjust to the darkness, and I spot her hand flailing wildly just at the surface. I pull her up and she gasps for air.

“You’re alright?” My voice echoes thunderously.

She nods, spitting water. “I couldn’t, the current…”

“Hurry, we haven’t time” I turn her away from the sewer entrance. Fighting the current I keep a wary eye on the hole for fear the soldiers will follow. All the while I hold Desiree up as the current threatens to drag her under.

The current slows, the water levels settling to our waist before too long. Near the beach it runs hardly deeper than our knees. For the first time it feels safe enough to pause for a rest. I settle against the wall. Desiree puts her face in my neck. Too numbed and too exhausted to cry she gives a long low moan.

Dogs have begun to pick at the dead on the beach. Their grisly task becomes all more chilling in the lessening amber light. They pay us little mind. Even still we keep well clear. From the bundles and scattered belongings we change from our wet clothes. Dressed in the things of the Low City people, there is a moment in which we realize our break with the Corporation. There is the odd realization of freedom, while not knowing precisely what that means. It is an entirely new land and a fundamentally knew sky that we come to now. It is an unfamiliar land so far away from the words I read in all those books. For freedom is not a battle to be won, but an eternal compromise between the desires of selfish heart against the tyranny of the world. And so I am free. The far horizon remains to challenge and define that idea. It is, at the end of this story, for me to weather that journey and, in the end, still remain true to my good heart.

Sunday, December 13, 2009

THE LAST MAN: Part Forty-two

I climb slowly to my feet. As I draw Desiree up, still shielding her with my body, it seems impossible we are still alive. Desiree is already pulling me towards the sewer, knowing full well this could be our last chance for escape. At the entrance to the alley I spot movement among the dead. I pull away from Desiree. Her fingers linger at the end of our touch. Her face fully reflects the urgency of this moment, but I have to go.

“Please, I beg you,” she pleads.

“One moment is all I ask.”

I take her in my arms and look purposefully into her tortured eyes. We both look to gunfire out in the street. The sound comes nearer with each passing heartbeat. Her fingers grip the sleeves of my tunic tightly, as if she might drag me away if all else fails.

“If something happens,” I tell her, “follow the sewer to the coast. You will find…”

“I won’t, not without you!”

“You must,” I say, pulling away. It takes every ounce of strength and courage I can muster her. We may only have this one chance, but I have to go.

I follow the wall to the top of the alley. In the street, a few yards away the Man from the Corporation lies bleeding. Bullets have pierced his body crossways from hip to shoulder. I am amazed he is still alive. Seeing me he musters the strength for an ironic smile. At the end of the street, in the direction of the Reclamation Center, Section Twenty-one troops loyal to him are fighting a losing battle against the Minister’s forces. Bullets rip at the air overhead and skip at the street close by.

Ignoring the fighting I kneel beside him. Gently I lay my hand upon his shoulder. It is cold to the touch. Already I can feel the life fleeing from his body.

“Seems as though I am the one eager to say goodbye now,” he says weakly.

A cross the street a man stumbles from the fight and collapses against the wall. The street battle reaches its climax. The man from the Corporation looks past me to the ultramarine sky, and the torn layers of smoke and dust.

“Does it hurt terribly?”

His eyes find mine. “I did not believe I would see you again. Don’t ascribe any purposefulness in saving you, if that is in fact what I’ve done.”

“Still, I owe you a debt, my friend.”

The word seems to catch him a moment. It seems to rescue him from the finality of the moment, more than he rescued Desiree and me from the Minister’s bullet.

“It is I who owe you a debt.” I said. “In the atrium you said something I did not understand. You said that a man alone is always defeated, but that a man alone has nothing to lose but his dignity, and that he will defend to the last.”

“I did.”

“But not all men. It takes an uncommon character.”

“Or a common man in an uncommon situation.”

“Perhaps if that were truer we would live in a very different world. I believe you are the last man…my friend”

Only a hand full of his loyal men remain now. They have retreated to doorways around us. At the top of the street, seeming to rise from the lingering smoke and haze from the Reclamation Center, an armored troop carrier creeps forward spitting fire around the street.

“Anything I can do for you?” I ask.

He looks to Desiree. There is a lonesome look to his eyes, as though he realizes something he has always missed but only now discovered. With his final breaths he reaches up and touches my face.

“She is waiting for you,” he says, breathing heavier and more erratic now. “See how she looks at you? That better world awaits if the two of you can find it.”

With that he is gone. As I close his eyes I know he meant less of the physical world than of something more. I am coming to a definition of love in Desiree. Implied in that word is the hope of a different world, if we can find it.