Grief

Passages

Every passage tagged with this emotion in the Vela corpus. Search the body text, narrow by source or register, click through to a book’s profile to see how the passage sits with the rest of the work.

Page 11 of 263 · 20 per page

• From History of the Christian Church: The Complete Set of Eight Volumes (1858)

  At one of the first sessions the pope delivered a sermon from the text, "See, ye who pass this way, was ever sorrow like unto my sorrow?" He dwelt upon five sorrows of the Church corresponding to the five wounds of Christ: the savage cruelty of the Mongols or Tartars, the schism of the Greeks, the growth of heresy, the desolation of Jerusalem, and the active persecution of the Church by the emperor. The charges against Frederick were sacrilege and heresy. As for the charge of heresy, Thaddeus maintained that it could be answered only by Frederick in person, and a delay of two weeks was granted that he might have time to appear. When he failed to appear, Innocent pronounced upon him the ban and declared him deposed from his throne. The deliverance set forth four grave offences; namely, the violation of his oath to keep peace with the Church, sacrilege in seizing the prelates on their way to the council, heresy, and withholding the tribute due from Sicily, a papal fief. Among the grounds for the charge of heresy were Frederick’s contempt of the pope’s prerogative of the keys, his treaty with the Sultan on his crusade, allowing the name of Mohammed to be publicly proclaimed day and night in the temple, having intercourse with Saracens, keeping eunuchs over his women, and giving his daughter in marriage to Battacius, an excommunicated prince. The words of the fell sentence ran as follows: — "Seeing that we, unworthy as we are, hold on earth the authority of our Lord Jesus Christ, who said to us in the person of St. Peter, ’whatsoever ye shall bind on earth,’ etc., do hereby declare Frederick, who has rendered himself unworthy of the honors of sovereignty and for his crimes has been deposed from his throne by God, to be bound by his sins and cast off by the Lord and we do hereby sentence and depose him; and all who are in any way bound to him by an oath of allegiance we forever release and absolve from that oath; and by our apostolic authority, we strictly forbid any one obeying him. We decree that any who gives aid to him as emperor or king shall be excommunicated; and those in the empire on whom the selection of an emperor devolves, have full liberty to elect a successor in his place."257 Thaddeus appealed from the decision to another council.258 His master Frederick, on hearing what was done, is said to have asked for his crown and to have placed it more firmly on his head.

• From Trash (1988)

  Mattie had small quick hands and a terror of the speeding shuttles. She kept her lower lip clenched in her teeth while she worked to untangle the bunched and knotted threads. Bo was clumsy and spent most of his time crawling underneath frames to grease the wheels that turned the bobbin belts. Sometimes he would crawl right up under Mattie’s hands and hiss up at her to get her attention. Both of them avoided their father. When their mother came to work in May, they avoided her too, but that was easier. Shirley had been transferred from the carding room to finishing. Safely separated from the rest of the mill by a wire-and-glass wall, Shirley and twelve other women ran up towels, aprons, and simple skirts from the end runs of same-fabric bolts. “You see what I mean?” Shirley’s mouth had grown so tight she seemed to have no lips at all. “Quality always shows, always finds its place. That foreman knows who I am.” Mattie sucked her gums and thought of the women at the mill who stepped aside when her mama passed. Everybody said Shirley Boatwright believed her piss was wine. Everybody said she repeated whatever she heard to the foreman on the second shift. And if Shirley Boatwright pissed wine, then there was no doubt that nasty son of a bitch pissed store-bought whiskey. “When we grow up . . .” Bo started whispering every night, and each child would finish the line in turn. “I’m gonna move to Texas.” “I an’t never gonna eat tripe no more.” “I’m gonna have six little babies and buy them anything they want.” “Gonna treat them good.” “Gonna tell them how pretty they are.” “Gonna love them, love them.” Sometimes, Mattie would let the youngest, Billy, climb up onto her lap. She’d hug and stroke him and quietly sing some gospel song for him, making up the words she couldn’t remember. “When we grow up,” Bo kept whispering. “When we grow up . . .” That too could have been a song. None of them knew what they might not do. Only Mattie had an idea that it was possible to do anything at all. Walking to work every morning, she passed the freight siding where James Gibson pulled barrels off his father’s wagon. The Gibsons ran a lumber business and most of the cane syrup shipped out of Greenville went out in their barrels. If he was there, James stopped and watched her walk by. Every time he saw her pass, he smiled. “I’ve got nine brothers,” he told her one morning. “But not one sister. Lord, I do love to look at pretty girls.”

• From Trash (1988)

  I held Mama’s free hand anyway, stepping away every time the doctor came in to wash with the soap the hospital provided. Mavis let me have a bottle of her own lotion when my fingers began to dry and the skin along my thumbs split. “Aloe vera and olive oil,” she told me. “Use it on your mama, too.” I took the bottle over to rub it into the paper-thin skin on the backs of Mama’s hands. She barely seemed to notice, though a couple of her veins had leaked enough to make swollen, blue-black blotches. Mama’s eyes tracked past me and even as I rubbed one hand, the fingers of the other reached for the morphine pump. That drip, that precious drip. Mama no longer hissed and gasped with every breath. Now she murmured and whispered, sang a little, even said recognizable names sometimes—my sisters, her sisters, and people long dead. Every once in a while, her voice would startle, the words suddenly clear and outraged. “Goddamn!” loud in the room. Then, “Get me a cigarette, get me a cigarette,” as she came awake. Angry and begging at the same time, she cursed, “Goddamn it, just one,” before the morphine swept in and took her down again. That was not our mama. Our mama never begged, never backed up, never whined, moaned, and thrashed in her sheets. My sister Jo and I stared at her. This mama was eating us alive. Every time she started it again, that litany of curses and pleas, I hunkered down further in my seat. Jo rocked in her chair, arms hugging her shoulders and head down. Arlene, the youngest of us, had wrung her hands and wiped her eyes, and finally, deciding she was no use, headed on home. Jo and I had stayed, unspeaking, miserable, and desperate. On the third night after they gave her the pump, Mama hit some limit the nurses seemed determined to ignore. Her thumb beat time, but the pump lagged behind and the curses returned. The pleas became so heartbroken I expected the paint to start peeling off the walls. The curses became mewling growls. Finally, Jo gave me a sharp look and we stood up as one. She went over to try to force the window open, pounding the window frame till it came loose. I dug around in Jo’s purse, found her Marlboros, lit one, and held it to Mama’s lips. Jo went and stood guard at the door. Mama coughed, sucked, and smiled gratefully. “Baby,” she whispered. “Baby,” and fell asleep with ashes on her neck. Jo walked over and took the cigarette I still held. “Stupid damn rules,” she said bitterly. Mavis came in then, sniffed loudly, and shook her head at us. “You know you can’t do that.” “Do what?” Jo had disappeared the smoke as if it had never been.

• From Crazy Brave (2012)

  My grandfather didn’t like pineapple and had every one of the plants dug up. His wealth came from the family’s allotted lands in Indian Territory. In November 1905, before Indian Territory became the State of Oklahoma, a huge oil gusher was discovered on the allotted lands of Ida E. Glenn. This became known as the Glenn Pool. It was the largest oil field in the Southwest. The family lands were part of this oil find. The family became wealthy. My father’s mother, Naomi Harjo, and my aunt Lois Harjo were well educated and received their BFA degrees in art at Oklahoma City University. My aunt Lois Harjo told me that family once owned much of the town of Okmulgee. My grandmother Naomi died of tuberculosis when my father was a small child. My father had to cross a gulf of sadness left by her absence to find a place for my mother, and then me and the rest of his children. His mother was unreachable except by memory. In the end, we must each tend to our own gulfs of sadness, though others can assist us with kindness, food, good words, and music. Our human tendency is to fill these holes with distractions like shopping and fast romance, or with drugs and alcohol. My father’s father, Allen W. Foster, married the caretaker of his children. My father gained stepbrothers and a half-sister. He grew up in a house that became known as the Foster Estate, though it was on his mother’s Creek land. When I was growing up, my father received enough in oil royalties to support his love for fine cars. I remember him taking apart and putting back together his black Cadillac and his Ford pickup. When my father passed from this world, the oil royalties were divided among his children. By the mid-eighties my brothers, sister, and I were each receiving about thirty dollars a month. Then the oil company stopped the payments. Stories can be very demanding and need care and assistance. The family oil story has a spirit and it wants my attention. [image "6706.jpg" file=Image00008.jpg] [image "6709.jpg" file=Image00009.jpg] [image "6711.jpg" file=Image00010.jpg] As I continued the journey to enter this realm, I watched my mother and father meet at Casa Loma Dance Hall. My mother was beautiful and magnetic. She was that mix of Cherokee and European that dazzles. She was meticulous in her dress. Her journey to Tulsa took determination on her part. She had to oppose her father, a man who favored her over her six brothers, and set her mother against her. She left her sharecropper family shack with her best friend, Elvira Guerra. They headed to Tulsa with money they made from picking crops. She set herself to mate for life. My father was ephemeral. He was about ten percent body. The other ninety percent of him was spirit and it was often unreachable, even to him. This earth can be difficult and jarring.

• From Trash (1988)

  “I did wonderful things. I did amazing things, and stoned only made me better, made me smoother. Loosened me up and made me psychic. I was doing acid when I got you those gloves. That windowpane Blackie sold us.” “Purple haze. You always talk about the windowpane, but we only did it once. You talk about the windowpane ’cause you like to scare people with the notion of you sticking it in your eyes.” “I only did it once with you. I did it lots with Mickey. We put it in our eyes, in our noses. Son of a bitch even shoved it up my ass.” She crushes the joint out on the bedframe. She is smiling and relaxed now, very beautiful even though I am getting angry. Mickey was the one took her to California after I ran off. Mickey was the one who got her back on junk, left her in the motel room where she overdosed. Mickey was the one threatened me at her memorial service, with his parole officer standing right there sweating in the heat. Mickey was the one I’d told to try it. Come for me, asshole, and I’ll cut off your balls and push them up your butt. The parole officer had smiled, and my sweat had turned cold on my back. That wasn’t like me, wasn’t the kind of thing I’d say. It wasn’t even the thing I’d been thinking. It was as if Katy had pushed the words out of my mouth. It was exactly the kind of thing Katy would have said. But Mickey had overdosed himself at Raiford, and I’d never seen any of Katy’s boyfriends again. Just Katy, anytime she gets restless and wants to come back. I look at her now and my throat closes up. I cannot make casual conversation, cannot talk at all. I want to reach for her but I am too afraid. She is the vampire curse in my life. You have to invite them back, and part of me always wants her, even when most of me don’t. Right now all of me wants her, flesh and blood, body and soul. Katy’s thick black eyebrows raise and lower, seeing right through me, seeing my grief and my lust. “Ahhh, bitch,” she whispers, and it sounds like lover. She slips one hand under the sheet and strokes her nails along my leg. I catch my breath. I could cry but don’t. Will we be lovers again? Is she real enough this moment to put her filmy body along my too-tight muscles? She wants to; it shows in the unaccustomed softness in her face. I feel tears run down my cheeks. Now she says it. “Lover.” “Junkie.” I hiss it at her, beginning to really cry, making a hoarse ugly sound in the quiet room. “Goddamn you, you goddamned junkie!”

• From The Well of Loneliness (1928)

  ‘You’re all the son that I’ve got,’ he told her. ‘You’re brave and strong-limbed, but I want you to be wise—I want you to be wise for your own sake, Stephen, because at the best life requires great wisdom. I want you to learn to make friends of your books; some day you may need them, because—’ He hesitated, ‘because you mayn’t find life at all easy, we none of us do, and books are good friends. I don’t want you to give up your fencing and gymnastics or your riding, but I want you to show moderation. You’ve developed your body, now develop your mind; let your mind and your muscles help, not hinder each other—it can be done, Stephen, I’ve done it myself, and in many respects you’re like me. I’ve brought you up very differently from most girls, you must know that—look at Violet Antrim. I’ve indulged you, I suppose, but I don’t think I’ve spoilt you, because I believe in you absolutely. I believe in myself too, where you’re concerned; I believe in my own sound judgment. But you’ve now got to prove that my judgment’s been sound, we’ve both got to prove it to ourselves and to your mother—she’s been very patient with my unusual methods—I’m going to stand trial now, and she’ll be my judge. Help me, I’m going to need all your help; if you fail then I fail, we shall go down together. But we’re not going to fail, you’re going to work hard when your new governess comes, and when you’re older you’re going to become a fine woman; you must, dear—I love you so much that you can’t disappoint me.’ His voice faltered a little, then he held out his hand: ‘and Stephen, come here—look me straight in the eyes—what is honour, my daughter?’ She looked into his anxious, questioning eyes: ‘You are honour,’ she said quite simply. 5When Stephen kissed Mademoiselle Duphot good-bye, she cried, for she felt that something was going that would never come back—irresponsible childhood. It was going, like Mademoiselle Duphot. Kind Mademoiselle Duphot, so foolishly loving, so easily coerced, so glad to be persuaded; so eager to believe that you were doing your best, in the face of the most obvious slacking. Kind Mademoiselle Duphot who smiled when she shouldn’t, who laughed when she shouldn’t, and now she was weeping—but weeping as only a Latin can weep, shedding rivers of tears and sobbing quite loudly. ‘Chérie—mon bébé, petit chou!’ she was sobbing, as she clung to the angular Stephen. The tears ran down on to Mademoiselle’s tippet, and they wet the poor fur which already looked jaded, and the fur clogged together, turning black with those tears, so that Mademoiselle tried to wipe it. But the more she wiped it the wetter it grew, since her handkerchief only augmented the trouble; nor was Stephen’s large handkerchief very dry either, as she found when she started to help.

• From Crazy Brave (2012)

  the millions and billions of people in the world. We were partying at Okie Joe’s up the street. He was talking politics with his buddies while I played pool with some of the other native students in the back room. I kept feeding the jukebox quarters, playing the Rolling Stones, “Wild horses couldn’t drag me away,” over and over again. He was down about the anniversary of the death of his best friend, who had been his idol. He had been the only man from a pueblo to finish law school at the university, and he fought the U.S. legal system by any means possible, including his fists. But he couldn’t fight alcohol. He was taken down by drink, his body found in a field weeks after his death. His grieving brothers were honoring him that night at the bar by drinking themselves to oblivion. They were getting rowdy. I tried to ignore them and kept shooting the solid balls into the pockets of the pool table, just as I had ignored my father when he and his friends partied, argued, and played. I knew the routine. There was a high, and then there was a low. Every tiny hair on the back of my neck went on alert when I heard his voice yelling above the crowd, “Fuck you!” We all ran in from the pool tables to see what was the matter. He aimed a pitcher of beer at the bartender; it missed and smashed into the bar mirror with a terrible crash. We all scattered as the bartender called the police. The poet refused to go; instead he decided to climb the fence to the roof of the bar. I tried to stop him. He climbed to the roof and jumped, then stood up, unhurt, like a defiant child, and walked away, the sound of approaching sirens growing loud and shrill. I should have left him then. Instead I caught a ride back with friends who tried to convince me to leave him. “No, I want to get the sad goodbye over with,” I told them. They convinced me to stay the night with one of them and go back in the morning. The next day, when I opened the door, all the lights in the house were on, the stereo was playing Kris Kristofferson, “Sunday Morning Coming Down,” and all the burners were on full blast, filling the house with gas. He was passed out on the couch with an unlit cigarette and matches in his hands from starting to make breakfast. Later he apologized profusely. This will never happen again, he promised. He

• From History of the Christian Church: The Complete Set of Eight Volumes (1858)

  All things are filled with tears, all are mourning, and on account of the multitudes already dead and still dying, groans are daily heard throughout the city ... There is not a house in which there is not one dead ... After this, war and famine succeeded which we endured with the heathen, but we bore alone those miseries with which they afflicted us ... But we rejoiced in the peace of Christ which he gave to us alone ... Most of our brethren by their exceeding great love and affection not sparing themselves and adhering to one another, were constantly superintending the sick, ministering to their wants without fear and cessation, and healing them in Christ." The heathen, on the contrary, repelled the sick or cast them half-dead into the street. The same self-denying charity in contrast with heathen selfishness manifested itself at Carthage during the raging of a pestilence, under the persecuting reign of Gallus (252), as we learn from Cyprian. Dionysius took an active part in the christological, chiliastic, and disciplinary controversies of his time, and showed in them moderation, an amiable spirit of concession, and practical churchly tact, but also a want of independence and consistency. He opposed Sabellianism, and ran to the brink of tritheism, but in his correspondence with the more firm and orthodox Dionysius of Rome he modified his view, and Athanasius vindicated his orthodoxy against the charge of having sowed the seeds of Arianism. He wished to adhere to Origen’s christology, but the church pressed towards the Nicene formula. There is nothing, however, in the narrative of Athanasius which implies a recognition of Roman supremacy. His last christological utterance was a letter concerning the heresy of Paul of Samosata; he was prevented from attending the Synod of Antioch in 264, which condemned and deposed Paul. He rejected, with Origen, the chiliastic notions, and induced Nepos and his adherents to abandon them, but he denied the apostolic origin of the Apocalypse and ascribed it to the "Presbyter John," of doubtful existence. He held mild views on discipline and urged the Novatians to deal gently with the lapsed and to preserve the peace of the church. He also counselled moderation in the controversy between Stephen and Cyprian on the validity of heretical baptism, though he sided with the more liberal Roman theory.

• From Crazy Brave (2012)

  And to open that book was to disappear into many dream worlds, like the ones I had left behind after I started school and began to perfect language. The collection was generous in scope and included everyone from Elizabeth Bishop and her spectacular poem “The Fish” to William Blake’s “The Tiger” and the hypnotic lines “Tiger, tiger, burning bright/In the forests of the night”; to Emily Dickinson (“I’m nobody! Who are you?”) and Lewis Carroll’s “The Crocodile” (“How doth the little crocodile/Improve his shining tail”). Those poems, taken as a group, summed up my soul at that crucial moment in my personal history. My father was out with girlfriends or coming home drunk and fighting my mother. He was the “tiger, tiger, burning bright.” My parents were in the process of a difficult divorce. My escape was remembering fishing with my grandfather the summer before and the “rainbow, rainbow, rainbow” of the caught fish glittering in the afternoon sunlight. I saw the police come to the house. My father staggered in and out with his belongings, with the smell of other women like strange clouds on his clothes. My mother confided my father’s shortcomings in me and I advised her to leave my father. I felt like I was “nobody—who are you?” My father disappeared. And so did I in this world without father. Emptiness took the place of everything I had known to be true. With the alligators or the crocodile, I could find refuge in another realm below this one. There are underground cities, other peoples. Even though I was the oldest female in my family, I didn’t gather and mother my brothers and sister when my father left. I dove into the other realm, and everyone was left to fend for him- or herself. [image "6706.jpg" file=Image00008.jpg] [image "6709.jpg" file=Image00009.jpg] [image "6711.jpg" file=Image00010.jpg] In one of my last childhood memories of my father, I was a brown child wearing one of those dollar-apiece sun suits made of cheap polished cotton that fades after the first wash. It was tied at my shoulders. Two blue-black braids hung down my back. I was sweaty from running; my knees were scraped from jumping and falling. I leaned against my father. I adored him. And I was afraid of him. Together both of those places lived within me. I looked up toward his face and read his lips for mood. I read for love or imminent cruelty. He was laughing and making a joke with his friends. Yeasty beer smell mixed with father sweat. He pulled me to his lap. I heard his heart beating. I tapped the rhythm on his pressed-jean thigh. I was always tapping rhythms. I counted. One, and ah. Two, and ah. Three, and ah. Our heartbeats are numbered. We have only so many allotted. When we use them up, we die. How many did my father have? How many did I have?

• From Crazy Brave (2012)

  I drew the outline of the Christmas tree. It had to be large, because it needed to hold all the ornaments and lights. Before Daddy had left that morning, he had pulled down the box of Christmas lights and decorations from the hall closet. While the dough was cooling in the icebox so we could make shapes, our mother unwrapped the cotton batting protecting the delicate ornaments. There were shiny, mirrored balls, spirals of icicles, and ropes of tinsel to be wound around the tree. A few prized ornaments were of Wise Men, soldiers, and angels, and my brother and I had to be extra-careful with them. They broke easily. “We decorate to welcome the baby Jesus,” our mother instructed us. “He reminds us to love each other.” Last year at church I was Mary and stood as far away as I could from Joseph, a boy in Sunday school who picked his nose and cried for his mother. The baby Jesus had eyes that rolled back in his head. I refused to pick up the doll and cradle him in adoration. The other kids sang “Away in a Manger” as the parents smiled. What was a manger, anyway? The church people gave us white paper bags of oranges and ribbon Christmas candies. That was my favorite part. My mother awakened me from the floor of the closet where I had fallen asleep. I was dreaming I was with my father in his boat at the lake. We couldn’t move through the water because the lake was frozen. I was getting cold. “It’s snowing, baby,” my mother whispered to me as she carried me to the window. My little brother was asleep, curled up on his cot. He looked like one of the delicate angel ornaments. Baby was sucking her hand as she dreamed and appeared to float in her bassinet. There was still no tree, no father. I felt bad about everything. “I’m sorry, Mama.” “Shush,” she cooed as she wiped the window free of frost. “Look at all the snow.” We looked out together into the shining world. There was magic in the whirling pictures the snow made. In the distance I imagined my father dragging home a tree taller than the house. He called out to my mother and me to open the door as he hefted the trunk to his shoulder to bring it back home in time for Christmas. I was four years old when I woke up with muscle stiffness, headache, and nausea—all the symptoms of polio. The o’ s of the word polio rolled through my mouth like a game of catch. The word sent hushed fear through the voices of my parents as they moved about me, attempting to alleviate my symptoms. My body was a hurting thing. Though I tried, I could not leave my body by will. I heard my mother on the phone with the doctor, her fear tensing the mother-cord between us.

• From Carmina (-50)

  nil mihi tam ualde placeat, Ramnusia uirgo, quod temere inuitis suscipiatur heris. quam ieiuna pium desideret ara cruorem, docta est amisso Laudamia uiro, 80 coniugis ante coacta noui dimittere collum, quam ueniens una atque altera rursus hiems noctibus in longis auidum saturasset amorem, posset ut abrupto uiuere coniugio, quod scibant Parcae non longo tempore abisse, 85 si miles muros isset ad Iliacos. nam tum Helenae raptu primores Argiuorum coeperat ad sese Troia ciere uiros, Troia (nefas) commune sepulcrum Asiae Europaeque, Troia uirum et uirtutum omnium acerba cinis, 90 qualiter et nostro letum miserabile fratri attulit. ei misero frater adempte mihi, ei misero fratri iucundum lumen ademptum, tecum una tota est nostra sepulta domus, omnia tecum una perierunt gaudia nostra, 95 quae tuus in uita dulcis alebat amor. quem nunc tam longe non inter nota sepulcra nec prope cognatos compositum cineris, sed Troia obscena, Troia infelice sepultum detinet extremo terra aliena solo. 100 ad quam tum properans fertur simul undique pubes Graeca penetralis deseruisse focos, ne Paris abducta gauisus libera moecha otia pacato degeret in thalamo. quo tibi tum casu, pulcerrima Laudamia, 105 ereptum est uita dulcius atque anima coniugium: tanto te absorbens uertice amoris aestus in abruptum detulerat barathrum, quale ferunt Grai Pheneum prope Cylleneum siccare emulsa pingue palude solum, 110 quod quondam caesis montis fodisse medullis audit falsiparens Amphitryoniades, tempore quo certa Stymphalia monstra sagitta perculit imperio deterioris heri, pluribus ut caeli tereretur ianua diuis, 115 Hebe nec longa uirginitate foret. sed tuus altus amor barathro fuit altior illo, qui actutum domitum ferre iugum docuit. nam neque tam carum confecto aetate parenti una caput seri nata nepotis alit, 120 qui cum diuitiis uix tandem inuentus auitis nomen testatas intulit in tabulas, impia derisi gentilis gaudia tollens, suscitat a cano uolturium capiti: nec tantum niueo gauisa est ulla columbo 125 compar, quae multo dicitur improbius oscula mordenti semper decerpere rostro, quam cum praecipue multiuola est mulier. sed tu horum magnos uicisti sola furores, ut semel es flauo conciliata uiro. 130 aut nihil aut paulo cui tum concedere digna lux mea se nostrum contulit in gremium, quam circumcursans hinc illinc saepe Cupido fulgebat crocina candidus in tunica. quae tamen etsi uno non est contenta Catullo, 135 rara uerecundae furta feremus herae, ne nimium simus stultorum more molesti. saepe etiam Iuno, maxima caelicolum, coniugis in culpa flagrantem contudit iram, noscens omniuoli plurima facta Iouis. 140 at, quia nec diuis homines componier aequum est, . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ingratum tremuli tolle parentis onus. nec tamen illa mihi dexstra deducta paterna fraglantem Assyrio uenit odore domum, sed furtiua dedit mira munuscula nocte, 145 ipsius ex ipso dempta uiri gremio. quare illud satis est, si nobis is datur unis quem lapide illa diem candidiore notat. hoc tibi, quod potui, confectum carmine munus pro multis, Alli, redditur officiis, 150 ne uestrum scabra tangat rubigine nomen haec atque illa dies atque alia atque alia.

• From Trash (1988)

  I sipped my beer and watched my aunt’s unchanging face. Very slowly she swung the pool cue up and down, not quite touching the table. After a moment she stepped in again and leaned half her weight on the table. The five ball became a bird murdered in flight, dropping suddenly into the far right pocket. Aunt Alma laughed out loud, delighted. “Never lost it,” she crowed. “Four years in the roadhouse with that table set up in the back. Every one of them sons of mine thought he was going to make money on it. Lord, those boys! Never made a cent.” She swallowed the rest of her glass of water. “But me,” she wiped the sweat away again. “I never would have done it for money. I just loved it. Never went home without playing myself three or four games. Sometimes I’d set Annie up on the side and we’d pretend we were playing. I’d tell her when I was taking her shots. And she’d shout when I’d sink ’em. I let her win most every time.” She stopped, put both hands on the table, and closed her eyes. “ ’Course, just after we lost her, we lost the roadhouse.” She shook her head, eyes still closed. “Never did have anything fine that I didn’t lose.” The room was still, dust glinted in the sunlight past her ears. She opened her eyes and looked directly at me. “I don’t care,” she began slowly, softly. “I don’t care if you’re queer or not. I don’t care if you take puppy dogs to bed, for that matter, but your mother was all my heart for twenty years when nobody else cared what happened to me. She stood by me. I’ve stood by her and I always thought to do the same for you and yours. But she’s sitting there, did you know that? She’s sitting there like nothing’s left of her life, like . . . like she hates her life and won’t say shit to nobody about it. She wouldn’t tell me. She won’t tell me what it is, what has happened.” I sat the can down on the stool, closed my own eyes, and dropped my head. I didn’t want to see her. I didn’t want her to be there. I wanted her to go away, disappear out of my life the way I’d run out of hers. Go away, old woman. Leave me alone. Don’t talk to me. Don’t tell me your stories. I an’t a baby in a basket, and I can’t lie still for it.

• From Trash (1988)

  The silence answers me. I wipe my fingertips on the porch, smell myrtle and crushed onion through the dust of passing trucks, watch Claire cross the yard, how she swings her arms and throws back her head, her white face with the black eyebrows etched as high and fierce as crows across the highway. I have not been this still in years, have not heard my own heart when I was not shadowed by full dark and bourbon, not looked into a face that mirrored mine as Temple’s does—bone to bone, ancient grief to daily rage. “How do you do it?” I ask her. “How do you live this far from the rest of the world?” “What do I need the world for?” Temple laughs at me. “Besides, I got sugar, just like Granny. Came on two years ago, and ’pressure, they say, though I an’t checking. What good is it to know you gonna die sooner than later? It makes me think the world’s too damn close on me anyway. “Claire, honey, pour me another glass of tea.” Claire, the wire child, thin as the poplar on the corner, pale as the birch peeling in the backyard, brings the jug in two hands and smiles at me. The little reddish-brown nodules on her shoulders could be freckles but are not. The flush under Temple’s skin deepens, and her hands start to shake on the glass. She is seeing what I am watching—Claire’s smile and those deadly little warts . “You know, a lot of famous people died of the lupus. But then people have it for years and never die, or at least don’t die of just that.” She sighs, rolls the ragged ends of her hair between fingers suddenly flushed pink. “You know what I did?” She looks away, away from me, away from her daughter, away from the dogs who paw restlessly at the bare patches near the trees. “I let them take his body. Told them to go ahead, do anything they had to. When it came down to it, I said, just tell me what it was. The girls, of course, I was thinking of the girls. And they took him, did their stuff to him, things I can’t even imagine. I don’t think, in the end, we buried more than the frame of him.” Temple’s hands shake, her tea spills over the splintered boards of the porch. Leaning forward makes her face go a deeper red. “Doctors, like lawyers you know, they don’t hurry. “I thought it would be a while, weeks maybe, even months. But Lord, years! I never thought they’d take years, and then tell me nothing. Just the lupus, ’cause of the spots and the strangling. Lupus like with Claire or that cousin I don’t know that I really believe ever existed. But hell, they didn’t really know what killed him. Lupus kills slow, and Robert died fast. “Sometimes, sometimes, I dream sometimes, oh God!”

• From Crazy Brave (2012)

  “Wait, wait,” he protested as he stared back at Lewis, who had no idea Herbie was interested in him. But Herbie knew better than to reveal his attraction, and pantomimed his broken heart behind Lewis’s broad back. We found Lupita almost immediately. “Over here,” she called brightly. She waved us into the shadow between the painting and drawing studios, where she was alone. “Okay, Venus,” joked Herbie. “This better be good. I just left the man of my dreams to come and look for you.” Her eyes shined as she pulled a pint of Everclear from under her jacket. “You guys go ahead,” I said. “I’ll sit this one out.” I was trying to be good. It was then that I saw the rough smudge of dirt on Lupita’s jacket, the dainty lace of twigs on her thick black hair, and the bruise decorating her wrist. I thought of Clarence and Lewis walking smugly into the dance. I knew they’d had their way with her. It was more than I could bear. I took a drink, then another. I lost track of time. One minute we were all back in the canteen dancing in a line to “Cotton-Eyed Joe” and then the next we were sitting under the moon out near the ditch with a stranger from town we’d hired to make a liquor run for us. The earth was spinning, and we were spinning with it. We leaned into the burn. Lupita told us about her life, about how her mother had died when she was ten years old and left her with her father. She told how her father would tie her hair up every morning with her mother’s ribbons before they left to work the fields together. Herbie showed us the scar on his back made by a man who beat him and then raped him for his girlish ways. He made it sound funny, but I didn’t laugh. I didn’t say anything: I was numb and flying far away, listening to the whir of the story as it unwound beneath the glowing moon. Herbie disappeared somewhere in the dark, and I could hear him throwing up. Someone was singing round-dance songs. A dog barked far, far away. Lupita had drifted into the bushes for what seemed years when the warning bell sounded from the girls’ dorm. The sky was still spinning, but I willed myself to walk, step by step, to find Lupita, to make it back to the dorm in time. I looked for her through the blur of stars and sadness. I lost her. Without warning I remembered the stacked stones in the quarry on the moon. I saw the unraveling story as it spun through time and space. And I saw what the old man had shown me that I hadn’t been able to recall until now—how each thought and action fueled the momentum of the story, how vulnerable we were to forgetting, all of us.

• From Crazy Brave (2012)

  Yet her father was of the Wind clan. At four years old, when your parents are gone, they are gone forever. I mourned. I did not speak to the staff who came to check my vital signs or change me. My parents arrived the next morning to take me home. The test results were negative. I did not have polio. [image "6706.jpg" file=Image00008.jpg] [image "6709.jpg" file=Image00009.jpg] [image "6711.jpg" file=Image00010.jpg] It was shortly after the polio scare that I began to dream the alligator dream. I am a young girl, between four and five years old. It’s early in the morning. I delight in my feet touching the ground and in the plant beings who line the trail to the river. I breathe in playful energy from small, familiar winds as I walk to get water for the family. The winds appear to part the tall reeds through which I walk with my water jar. An alligator whips me suddenly to the water and pulls me under. I struggle, and then I am gone. My passing from earth is a quick choke. To my mourning family, my life has been tragically ended. They did not see that I entered an underwater story to live with the alligators and become one of them. I had that dream many times throughout my childhood. (My parents gave me a little brown dog, and I named him Alligator. He lived for the thrill of chasing cars. No matter where or how we penned him, when he heard a car, he was gone. One day he finally caught a car and that was the end of him.) I believe now that I had the beginnings of polio. The alligators took it away. It is possible. This world is mysterious. [image "6706.jpg" file=Image00008.jpg] [image "6709.jpg" file=Image00009.jpg] [image "6711.jpg" file=Image00010.jpg] In those early years I lived in a world of animal powers. Most children do. In those years we are still close to the door of knowing. I got to know the trees, plants, and creatures around our little white house with red trim built in the postwar boom. Our house was one of many houses on the block. Each centered on a square of lawn, each with a gas meter perched near the street, in the place of a house altar. I played with garter snakes, horned toads, frogs, June bugs, and other creatures. Some of my favorite playmates were roly-poly bugs. They busied about with several legs and didn’t trip themselves up. They protected themselves when threatened by curling into a ball. As we played, I could see the light shining around their little armored bodies. I enjoyed lightning bugs, what others call fireflies, on long summer nights. I saw them as tiny stars lighting up the intimate, close skies of childhood. One morning I went with my mother across the street to visit her friend, another Cherokee woman.

• From Crazy Brave (2012)

  The story of my grandfather Monahwee and the people at the Battle of Horseshoe Band was horrific and it made a deep groove in the family and tribal memory. A story matrix connects all of us. There are rules, processes, and circles of responsibility in this world. And the story begins exactly where it is supposed to begin. We cannot skip any part. In some story realms the baby is born and the next day he or she is a giant who kills monsters. Mine was not that kind of story. I am born of brave people and we were in need of warriors. My father and I had lost the way. I was born puny and female and Indian in lands that were stolen. Many of the people were forgetting the songs and stories. Yet others hid out and carried the fire of the songs and stories so we could continue the culture. In a world long before this one, there was enough for everyone until somebody got out of line. We heard it was Rabbit, fooling around with clay and the wind. Everybody was tired of his tricks and no one would play with him; he was lonely in this world. So Rabbit thought to make a person. And when he blew into the mouth of that crude figure to see what would happen, the clay man stood up. Rabbit showed the clay man how to steal a chicken. The clay man obeyed. Then Rabbit showed him how to steal corn. The clay man obeyed. Then he showed him how to steal someone else’s wife. The clay man obeyed. Rabbit felt important and powerful. The clay man felt important and powerful. And once that clay man started, he could not stop. Once he took that chicken, he wanted all the chickens. And once he took that corn, he wanted all the corn. And once he took that wife, he wanted all the wives. He was insatiable. Then he had a taste of gold and he wanted all the gold. Then it was land and anything else he saw. His wanting only made him want more. Soon it was countries, and then it was trade. The wanting infected the earth. We lost track of the purpose and reason for life. We began to forget our songs. We forgot our stories. We could no longer see or hear our ancestors, or talk with each other across the kitchen table. Now Rabbit couldn’t find a drink of fresh water. The forests were being mowed down all over the world. The earth was being destroyed to make more, and Rabbit had no place to play. Rabbit’s trick had backfired. Rabbit tried to call the clay man back, but when the clay man wouldn’t listen, Rabbit realized he’d made a clay man with no ears. I was not brave. I was pulled from my mother, whom I almost killed with the struggle. I was hooked up to a ventilator.

• From Trash (1988)

  Nobody really knows Temple. The women smile about her, say, “Lord God, but she loved that man.” Everybody says it’s a pity, how she sits, how she doesn’t get on with her life, take another husband, have another child, plant zinnias or baby’s breath and go on. Go on. I sit on Temple’s porch and drink coffee, drink tea when the morning heats up, talk to her of New York and California, of cities she’s never seen. I watch how she laughs, her red hair swinging from side to side, bringing the gray and white to the surface, bringing out the shadows and wrinkles under her eyes. “How can you live in a city? All those pictures like to make my heart hurt. I could smell it—hot concrete, tar, and piss. No green for miles. No color a’tall. Lord, where’s the life in it?” I tell her about the color of night, the lights on the bridges, the hot shine in the women’s eyes, the cold glare of metal moving fast. I tell her about the cold winter light shining on flat stacks of slate, hanging over the New Jersey highways, the cars growling rock music out their vents—how tight the people wear their clothes, how tall the buildings, how sweet the dawn after you do not sleep for days. The silence answers me. I wipe my fingertips on the porch, smell myrtle and crushed onion through the dust of passing trucks, watch Claire cross the yard, how she swings her arms and throws back her head, her white face with the black eyebrows etched as high and fierce as crows across the highway. I have not been this still in years, have not heard my own heart when I was not shadowed by full dark and bourbon, not looked into a face that mirrored mine as Temple’s does—bone to bone, ancient grief to daily rage. “How do you do it?” I ask her. “How do you live this far from the rest of the world?” “What do I need the world for?” Temple laughs at me. “Besides, I got sugar, just like Granny. Came on two years ago, and ’pressure, they say, though I an’t checking. What good is it to know you gonna die sooner than later? It makes me think the world’s too damn close on me anyway. “Claire, honey, pour me another glass of tea.” Claire, the wire child, thin as the poplar on the corner, pale as the birch peeling in the backyard, brings the jug in two hands and smiles at me. The little reddish-brown nodules on her shoulders could be freckles but are not. The flush under Temple’s skin deepens, and her hands start to shake on the glass. She is seeing what I am watching—Claire’s smile and those deadly little warts.

• From Trash (1988)

  I was crazy, you know, oh yes. We lost the store, the car, even the baby’s bed—all those weeks with Robert lying still, breathing like a train going up a hill. All that slow, crazy time, and me crazy. Me just out of my head. I was howling at Granny, screaming at the girls, tearing at myself. Hated myself, like I’d done it, like I’d brought it on him. Nobody in his family had it, but Granny said we’d had a cousin with it, so maybe it had come through me. “It was important then, how it had come on us. Later I didn’t care, but then it was like that was the only thing that mattered.” Dust drifts down in the sunlight. Another truck turns the corner and shakes the porch. It’s a short cut, this road and Temple’s lot. Truckers come through and wave. Temple ignores them, slaps her porch, watches the dirty paint flake down. The dogs in the yard, tied off to a tree, howl and kick and lie down again, panting in the heat. “I got mustard grass, you know, and yellow nettles. Grow ’em cause it makes people mad, ’cause an’t nobody can tell me anything. It keeps people away, makes sure no one touches what’s mine. ” They still have fireflies in Greenville, and green tree frogs, katydids, and rock-sucking worms. The muscadines still hang in sheets off the trees behind Old Henderson Road. Once every few years, Temple takes up with some traveling man, someone she can’t see staying around. She wants nobody permanent now, not after Robert and the girls, that first baby, everybody she ever loved. “Temple’s nothing but trouble,” the cousins claim. They complain of her life, her girls. “Hard-assed, cold-hearted woman.” Everybody agrees. “Thinks more of that ratty-walled house than her family, thinks more of herself than a woman should.” Off Old Henderson Road, the porches tilt. The paint chips off. Temple’s bathroom is still out back of the pines. She has the cousins come over to prop the windows, wire back the roof where the slats are sliding down. Where the paint has gone the wood stays bare and rain-marked. She won’t paint again, says it will just flake off in the heat. Kids come over from West Greenville, drive their pickups right up on the grass, hide behind the dead vines that shield the shed out back; stare in where Temple stores broken chairs, empty boxes, an extra bed. They giggle a lot, smoke dope, and occasionally fall through the rotten boards. “You gonna pay for that, you white-eyed son of a bitch!” Temple threatens to pen that shed for chickens, set traps, loose the dogs. All she really does is talk to the uncles real loud on the phone. “Come up here and shoot me a few of these bastards!” Sometimes she doesn’t bother to dial.

• From Trash (1988)

  I rolled away, but I didn’t cry. I almost never let myself cry. Almost always, we were raped, my cousins and I. That was some kind of joke, too. “What’s a South Carolina virgin?” “ ’At’s a ten-year-old can run fast.” It wasn’t funny for me in my mama’s bed with my stepfather; not for my Cousin Billie in the attic with my uncle; nor for Lucille in the woods with another cousin; for Danny with four strangers in a parking lot; or for Pammy, who made the papers. Cora read it out loud: “Repeatedly by persons unknown.” They stayed unknown since Pammy never spoke again. Perforations, lacerations, contusions, and bruises. I heard all the words, big words, little words, words too terrible to understand. DEAD BY AN ACT OF MAN. With the prick still in them, the broom handle, the tree branch, the grease gun . . . objects, things not to be believed . . . whiskey bottles, can openers, grass shears, glass, metal, vegetables . . . not to be believed, not to be believed. Jesse says, “You’ve got a gift for words.” “Don’t talk,” I beg her, “don’t talk.” And this once, she just holds me, blessedly silent. I dig out the pictures, stare into the faces. Which one was I? Survivors do hate themselves, I know, over the core of fierce self-love, never understanding, always asking, “Why me and not her, not him?” There is such mystery in it, and I have hated myself as much as I have loved others, hated the simple fact of my own survival. Having survived, am I supposed to say something, do something, be something? I loved my Cousin Butch. He had this big old head, pale thin hair and enormous, watery eyes. All the cousins did, though Butch’s head was the largest, his hair the palest. I was the dark-headed one. All the rest of the family seemed pale carbons of each other in shades of blond, though later on everybody’s hair went brown or red, and I didn’t stand out so. Butch and I stood out—I because I was so dark and fast, and he because of that big head and the crazy things he did. Butch used to climb on the back of my Uncle Lucius’s truck, open the gas tank and hang his head over, breathe deeply, strangle, gag, vomit, and breathe again. It went so deep, it tingled in your toes. I climbed up after him and tried it myself, but I was too young to hang on long, and I fell heavily to the ground, dizzy and giggling. Butch could hang on, put his hand down into the tank and pull up a cupped palm of gas, breathe deep and laugh. He would climb down roughly, swinging down from the door handle, laughing, staggering, and stinking of gasoline. Someone caught him at it. Someone threw a match. “I’ll teach you.” Just like that, gone before you understand.

• From Trash (1988)

  Her screams went up and down in the back of the house. Cousin Cora brought buckets of bloody rags out to be burned. The other cousins all ran off to catch the sparks or poke the fire with dogwood sticks. I waited on the porch making up words to the shouts around me. I did not understand what was happening. Some of the older cousins obviously did, their strange expressions broken by stranger laughs. I had seen them helping her up the stairs while the thick blood ran down her legs. After a while the blood on the rags was thin, watery, almost pink. Cora threw them on the fire and stood motionless in the stinking smoke. Randall went by and said there’d be a baby, a hatched egg to throw out with the rags, but there wasn’t. I watched to see and there wasn’t; nothing but the blood, thinning out desperately while the house slowed down and grew quiet, hours of cries growing soft and low, moaning under the smoke. My Aunt Raylene came out on the porch and almost fell on me, not seeing me, not seeing anything at all. She beat on the post until there were knuckle-sized dents in the peeling paint, beat on that post like it could feel, cursing it and herself and every child in the yard, singing up and down, “Goddamn, goddamn that girl . . . no sense . . . goddamn!” I’ve these pictures my mama gave me—stained sepia prints of bare dirt yards, plank porches, and step after step of children—cousins, uncles, aunts; mysteries. The mystery is how many no one remembers. I show them to Jesse, not saying who they are, and when she laughs at the broken teeth, torn overalls, the dirt, I set my teeth at what I do not want to remember and cannot forget. We were so many we were without number and, like tadpoles, if there was one less from time to time, who counted? My maternal great-grandmother had eleven daughters, seven sons; my grandmother, six sons, five daughters. Each one made at least six. Some made nine. Six times six, eleven times nine. They went on like multiplication tables. They died and were not missed. I come of an enormous family and I cannot tell half their stories. Somehow it was always made to seem they killed themselves: car wrecks, shotguns, dusty ropes, screaming, falling out of windows, things inside them. I am the point of a pyramid, sliding back under the weight of the ones who came after, and it does not matter that I am the lesbian, the one who will not have children. I tell the stories and it comes out funny. I drink bourbon and make myself drawl, tell all those old funny stories.