Men in Caves segment draft

His fingers were covered with splotches of black ink, especially near the knuckles and fingertips. There was a smudge or two on his nose, where he had scratched it, not knowing his hands were tainted with the ink. The ledger book that were opened on his desk were full of corrections, and red ink, and illegible words that he had to decipher. The previous clerk had only been on the job a month before isolation and depression had sent him down the mountain with his tail between his legs. Adam was his replacement, seen as a stronger sort by the mine manager. During the interview, which had taken place on the telephone, the manager had asked Adam if he liked to be alone, and Adam said that he did.

He had to take the call at the post office, since the telephone at his apartment building was on a party line and located in the small, open lobby. Adam always had a hunch that the neighbors were listening, so he kept his calls short, which actually helped tremendously when his mother or his one of his aunts called.

 

**I am keeping some of my drafts here for Men in Caves, because it’s so easy to organize them on wordpress (and of course I love the instant gratification). They’re more for my own benefit than anything; it’s a sort of accountability to write in a more public forum on a longer project, isn’t it? Since I haven’t held hands with or even nodded to these folks in the several months since I finished the first draft, I’m treating them with kid gloves. Look at them: they’re sort of creeping out tentatively, their eyes blurry and squinting as they adjust to the bright light. I’ve neglected their daily routines. Their clothes are torn and dusty, their teeth need brushed, their hair is full of tangles. Is there a patron saint of neglected fictional characters? Or a separate layer of hell reserved for their shimmering, malformed figures? Or is that layer kept for writers who neglect them? ;)**

adam’s closet

Adam was born in an alcove that sat adjacent to his parent’s bedroom, in a house that was ruled by its children.  Adam’s father was an engineer, quietly inventive and methodical, and had rigged the main staircase in the house so that it would at the crank of a lever into a slide for his two children. When the heavy crank, which was located at the top of the stairs on the second floor landing, would turn, each step would fold inward like a giant Jacob’s ladder. Adam and his older sister May would crank the lever together, it was too heavy to do alone, and down they’d go, landing in a laughing heap on the black and white marble foyer floor.

Adam’s father had also hung a sturdy wooden swing in the middle of the second-floor hall, in between Adam and May’s room. It was suspended from an oak beam that ran the length of the fourteen foot ceiling with two heavy, sturdy ropes. When Adam was six and May was eight, May had braided black and pink velvet ribbon around the ropes, so that when they pumped their bruised and scabbed legs to propel the swing skyward the ribbons curled and flapped in the breeze. At the end of the hall, just a foot away from their feet when they swung the swing up high, was a set of French doors that opened to a small balcony that looked out to the sky and the roof of their across the street neighbor. May liked to open the French doors to let the wind and the sky in, and if there were enough clouds and if they opened their eyes up just slightly, it felt like they were flying in the sky and not in their hallway.

The house also had a few hidden passages, and one was in Adam’s closet. Adam had defaced the door several times, creating a collage of glue and newsprint that hid the chaos of toys and books that lived in the closet. Hidden in the floorboards was a trapdoor that opened to a small staircase that led to the basement. The individual steps were only a foot wide, and there was no railing, only bare plaster. No lights illuminated the dusty tight space, people using the steps had to use candles on plates or lanterns. Adam had only used the secret stairs a few times, it spooked him and he figured there were plenty of ghosts and spiders to make use of the stairs…it didn’t need his patronage. His house had been an end-point for escaped slaves on the Underground Railroad, and his room had once been one without doors or windows: a hiding, holding room before the slaves could take a final breath of freedom. When Adam’s parents had bought the home in 1915, they hired local contractors to carve a door out of the plaster and wood frame wall as well as to knock out a big hole and adding plane glass to give the formerly windowless corner room a wide, yawning picture window. Adam loved his room and felt like he lived in the treetops. He loved the big window so much that he insisted, once he could insist such things, that his father move his bed to the wall adjacent the big friendly window, and away from the closet wall. His father had once told him the story of the secret passage and why it was in the house and what it meant, that it wasn’t a real steam locomotive that ran beneath the ground but a procession of people escaping enslavement in the south. That their house had been important in helping free men, women, and children. When it was daylight Adam loved the story and thought that his house was a hero-house but when it was nighttime he  had to close his eyes super-tight to keep out images of people with haunted eyes and torn clothes marching up and down the steps inside his closet.

Blake and Justine

Blake had wanted to give Justine a life of sweet smelling powder rooms with gold faucets. He wanted her to be able to walk softly on thick carpet in maribou slippers, in a house where she didn’t have to slip out of her pink silk robe all day if she chose not to. When he accepted the foreman position at the mine he knew that vision would have to evaporate, the robe would have to be flannel, the maribou slippers a pair of slouchy woolen socks. His faint and gossamer girl would have to harden, solidify, walk with less tiptoe and more stomp. He couldn’t imagine her shaking snow off of thick black boots or even wearing a pair of pants; when he first met her all she wore were dotted swiss dresses in pale yellows, pinks, whites, ivories, baby blues. These cloudy dresses contrasted with her thick dark hair, causing her to look like the sad faced porcelain dolls his sister collected as a girl. Blake laughed to think of her tromping through mud, of picking berries in rubber boots. But she did, of course. We know that now. Blake didn’t get to see her with mud splashed up her pants and streaked across her face, because she washed it off before he returned from a day in the mine. From five-thirty to six Justine peeled off the glacial mud stained blue jeans and replaced them with one of her little dresses, yellow with rick rack piping. On top of this she added one of her soft blue sweaters, fuzzy now with too many washings. By the time Blake arrived home she was a cotton ball again.

I need to start writing Men in Caves stuff before it gets too late at night. Sleep is sitting next to me on the couch, eying me warily and very, very impatiently.

Justine and Anna

When Anna came up the mountain it was Justine who showed her to her rooms. The classroom and the bedchamber were cold from a Winter of little use, and Justine profusely apologized and made herself a martyr a thousand times over for not having cleaned the room up, not stirring the cobwebs up with a broom, not lemon oiling the desks. Justine thought the girl was downright lovely. She allowed the monster whose name is Jealousy, who lives inside all beautiful women to fully gobble her up in its stomach. From that dreary and miserable cave, she saw Anna as young, as healthy, as attractive, as bright, as coltish, as new and she twisted these perfectly wonderful attributes and made them into something vicious and with vendetta. There was nothing used up about Anna. Justine felt like the twisted opposite of Anna, like a festering evil twin. She figured Blake would like to meet Anna and would like to sleep with her too,  if he weren’t as moral and good as Campbell’s Tomato Soup. She also figured Adam would feel a stirring in his chest upon meeting the new teacher, and strut embarrassingly like a bird of paradise showing off its feathers. That the promise possibility and a physical embodiment of an alternative to Justine and her sadness would turn to face him and he would realize that his timid seduction of a married woman (with stretch marks at that with no babies around her to validate them) was futile and narrow minded at best. The breath of fresh air and aroma of new corn that surrounded Anna frightened Justine. Justine who used to love change and new people in her life, was now afraid of not only her own shadow but of a willowy innocent twenty year old new governess.

Justine set her lower lip firmly under her upper lip and chewed, chewed, chewed. She showed Anna the new globe and she showed Anna the fresh new mattress and she showed her the view from the window of the schoolroom. She wanted to make the girl feel at home, wanted to make Anna like her and like the mine, in spite of the acid that swirled inside her. Allowing herself a tight smile,  she  forced herself to extend  an invitation for a percolator full of coffee, sure the girl would not accept and claim that she only took tea or something even more wholesome like milk. Justine was afraid of liking Anna and she was afraid everyone else would like her, too.

But imagine the feeling and the hesitant warmth; imagine Justine as she hears Anna accept the coffee invitation, saying “oh, be glad to and thank you…I love coffee.” Imagine how it felt  when Anna placed her long thin hand in Justine’s  soft plump one . How it felt to Justine when Anna tightened her grip just a little,  continuing in a steady and melodious voice that reminded Justine of cello music, “I’m so glad to finally be here, it’s so far away but not lonesome feeling at all.”

Confusion and envy and self loathing made way for calm. Suddenly Justine was happy that Anna was here in the Valley, too. She led her back down through the labyrinth of staircases, back outside in the sharp Spring chill, quietly turning to Anna (they were still holding hands) and saying,

“It smells like worms out here. Things are starting to grow again.”

The Wolf

When I’ve got a new character sometimes they present themselves to me boldfaced, strident, standing on a cliff in their tailored or tattered clothing and prepared to jump, or climb down. I don’t have to do any work except type. They offer to show me the rest, but only I’m ready to watch and listen. Closely, though. They’re skittish, my characters. It’s almost as though they don’t think I’m ready to enter their dominion.

I’ve got a new one. She’s not as pretty as Justine but she’s much more balanced (with a few exceptions – aren’t we all made up of neurotic and annoying exceptions?)…

Anna always closed her eyes when she heard classical music. Her family traveled too much, moved around too much, were too much like Bedouins in their routines  for her to be able to do any formal training or any formal appreciation, but she still closed her eyes when she heard it. She would have liked to have played the cello.

Before her parents decided to farm in Alaska (which she of course thought was utterly loony), they had lived in Baltimore for around six months. This was as close as a long time home that Anna had had in her sixteen years. She loved her school, she loved the smelly big city, she loved all the skin tones and accents and tin rusted cars that shoved their noses all over the sidewalks. Anna did well in all ten schools she attended during her secondary education, but she thrived at the Baltimore school. Academic music instructors were hard to come by in public schools at the time, especially in the small country schools that she usually briefly attended before her parents packed up and moved on to another town. Her folks ran little newspaper stands at train depots. Her father would handle the periodicals, the dry goods, the accounting. Her mother made the coffee to sell and warm things to eat for the travelers. They were proud that Anna had seen the country from Abbot, Maine  to Astoria, Oregon. That her childhood was peppered with diverse experiences and people, but they sensed that the girl wanted roots, even whisp-thin ones.

Anna did want roots. Alaska wasn’t what she had in mind, though. Her parents’ plans were never what she had in mind. In Baltimore the school did have a full-time music instructor who played cello with the Baltimore symphony. He would bring in various musicians and Anna and her schoolmates could try out all of their instruments. She loved them all, but especially her instructor’s cello. It was warm. It had a round and full body like a curvaceous woman (she herself was all sinew and railroad tie thin), and its voice was amber, warmth, and glow. When she struck a note clearly it felt like she was vibrating straight down to the center of the Earth. When her instructor played she felt the eyes of God watching from the back of the class, approving and closing at the pretty parts just like Anna did.

About a week before she moved with her family to Alaska to help grow giant vegetables and sell them to gold mines and armies, the music instructor brought a record in to play for the class. Anna felt like there was no more handsome man in the Universe, no one could wear black slacks and sweater vests and wear a trim beard like he could. His beard was an oddity for that time, most men were clean shaven and Brillo creamed to a high gloss. He was rough. He was passionate. He was thirty-five. He was something shining and perfect the day that he brought the record in, it was early Spring, there were buds on the cherry trees outside the iron framed windows. Anna sat straight at her desk, ceasing her typical music class activity of picking at her pilled angora sweater while trying not to stare at the instructor.

He went on to explain that this symphony was new that he was about to play, and that it was rare to be listened to by American ears because it was from the USSR. Several of the boys whistled low, their fathers talked about that stuff at home.

“It’s not a secret that I have it, I received it innocently enough from one of the violinists who just returned from Paris. One of his flatmates gave it to him to take back and share with us at the symphony. He did. And now I’m sharing it with you. It’s a children’s story, and though you all are older than children, it’s still enjoyable at any age. There’s a story that goes along with it, too…” and he fumbled with some sheaths of paper on his desk, shifting them to his chair, until he unearthed a small brown book with Russian letters written in gold on the cover. There was a small illustration of a peasant boy holding a duck. “I can read Russian, so I can read along and explain the characters. Each instrument takes on a role and has a theme to go with their role. There is a young boy, named Peter, he is the strings. There is a wolf, who is the French horns…there is a – “ the instructor strode to the blackboard and wrote out in chalk each of the characters with each of their corresponding instrument section.

Peter = strings

Bird = flute

Wolf = French horns

Grandfather = bassoon

Hunters = woodwinds

Gunshots = timpani and brass drums

Cat = clarinet

Duck = oboe

“Why don’t I just play the record? We don’t have much time left today.”, he smiled as he wiped his long fingered hands free of chalk dust on a red cloth before handling the rare recording again. Anna felt greedy at the notion of hearing a new recording and new classical music aside from the smatterings that she’d heard in free concerts in the towns and cities she had been forced to live in.

“I’ll read the story in English, so you can follow.” Anna sincerely wished he would read some of it in Russian, but she knew that Russian was not a good language to share your knowledge of with students at the moment. She wanted to sit at his home and listen to him speak it. To her. While she didn’t have any clothes on.

The instructor held the record with such care, slowly bringing it to the school’s ancient gramophone, lowering the needle to the fragile black surface of the record’s surface, and then began to translate on sight the small accompanying Russian story book as the record began.

“This is the story, of Peter and the Wolf. Each character in this tale is going to be represented by a different instrument of the orchestra…for instance, the bird will be played by the flute, like this -“

Anna instinctively closed her eyes as the flute began the bird’s simple trill. It couldn’t be helped. Once she heard the music she was instantly sent somewhere else and couldn’t be contacted from that dimension until the music stopped. There she rolled down hills and kicked her heels until she floated a foot or two above pavement. She lived through tragedy and ecstasy along with the story of the music. The complex children’s tale, with its undertones of terror and overtones of joyful youth brought her directly into the cold woods of Russia with Peter, the hunters, and the slinky wolf, licking its sensual mouth after devouring the animals that Peter loves.

She was unaware of the rest of the class, who were giving off airs of boredom and thoughts of the weekend. By the time Peter’s theme ran across the record, with its minor chords and sweet violins she was already in her other place. A place she could always carry with her, from Baltimore to Palmer, Alaska, and allow the tears to come to her eyes and the memory of that handsome music instructor warm her silent evenings after her parents had gone to bed in their cold, simple beds. She remembered something she learned in history. That Alaska used to be owned by Russia, and that it shared its climate and birch trees. Her mouth turned upwards at one corner, and she was suddenly ready to leave Baltimore. She had heard there were still many wolves in Alaska, and that they circled towns and threatened livestock. She also knew that they were beautiful, that their eyes glowed amber, and that there were hunters who kept them at bay. She was fascinated and she was ready.

I’m aware now that this needs more. But it came out as it wished, and though Anna is still a bit of a vapor to me, she’s starting to materialize. My writing is an exercise in divining these people out of the corridors. Sometimes I feel like a medium at a Victorian spiritualist gathering. Purple turban and all. Sorry if you’re not buying it, but there really is someone shaking the chandelier.

Tracks

She warms up with paints she brought up from civilization. She splats and mushes and pushes it around canvas that she had Wells Fargoed up when the summer began; she knew it would be spectacular. She works with her brushes and then throws them in a tin can and moves the paint around with her fingers, as if she were a child and this were her mother’s kitchen instead of her own. She takes the canvas off of the easel that Blake bought her in Anchorage and sails it down to the parquet floor. It lands with a whoosh and a phlump and a whack. It’s a large canvas, a great big stretched piece of it and Justine especially enjoys tightening the frame with the little frame screws. The mechanics and the background and the supplies of painting bring out more pleasure than a pristinely finished painting ever could. She sets to work on the floor, swirling blue, red, black, white; making the perfect purple to emulate the lupine that’s just arrived in the valley.

There’s a little window off the kitchen that brings in some decent morning light and then progressively intensifies throughout the day and most of the evening, turning to forever twilight around ten o’ clock. She was trying to paint the light, but though she had a lovely vision and a lot of skill, her hands and fingers fumbled at getting colors and shapes just as she wanted. The flowers looked like something a child might paint, something that would draw praise from a parent, not something from someone who had attended art school. This is why Justine was now painting on the floor with her fingers.

Blake had given her a warning the night before. He missed her spark, her blissful sighs as they lay next to one another in their tiny bed. He felt she was growing too isolated –

“We leave here soon or you’re going back by yourself. It’s too much for you up here, I’ve asked too much of you to be so far away.”

Justine rolled over toward Blake, her face resting on her upper arm (which usually left a smudge of her mascara like a bruise on her skin), “I don’t want to be alone. I don’t want to be without you. I’m fine here. I mean,  I have the other wives…and you after six o’clock.” She said this with calm, with sweetness and light. Inside she was seething/screaming –

“Oh……..please we can’t go and you can’t go and we can’t go I love you too much but you’ll find out soon but maybe we should leave now before it’s too late before I can’t stop the pull…”

What if everyone spoke in the rhythmic rhyme and scattered fragmented sentences that we think in? Would we allow that sort of raw emotion and raw passion to be our every day ho-hum existence? Should we try it, just to say we did? It could have helped Justine out a great deal, it could have saved her a lot of pain and confusion. She would have stopped being such a lyrical bore. I’m afraid her time of ruminating is drawing to a close. Something is coming to the valley that will stop Justine and Adam in their hesitant and guilt-ridden tracks. And the best thing? That something doesn’t have the slightest clue that she’s the powder keg that will begin and end it all.

Watchers

The Valley, tipped off-center in the clouds, was host to more than lurid red secret romances and surly miners. There were children. There were animals. There were watchers: boys who stuck around long after they weren’t supposed to, until the cold ceased to bother them and the sun didn’t tease them and the eagles were the only ones to see them walk softly on the jagged rocks and crooked walkways around the mine. They watched the odd smattering of children who now lived at the mine clutch red and black plaid lunch pails and canvas satchels as they stepped in thick mukluks over heaves of snow. They watched them as a beautiful teacher taught them history, and composition, and music, and math up in the high green room, so close to where the watchers used to sleep,  so close to where the miners and their fresh-scrubbed families took their meals. They could smell the loaves baking downstairs. They could smell the sauerkraut bubbling in cast iron pots seeping in from the larger families apartments that shared the building with the commissary and school. They could taste nothing but fresh air, consume nothing but thoughts. They were vapor.

When they lived, they lived in the tip top attic of the commissary building, during the mine’s first gold-flecked boom. There wasn’t the space for them in the newer dormitories with two bathrooms per floor, a movie screen, billiards, and a girl for every body that wasn’t too tired out from mucking all day. They were the extras. They were young and didn’t make a lot of money so the girls didn’t pay any attention to them, anyway. In the tip-top attic room that folded into odd shapes like a pop up book, the drafts from the gravelly mountain pass swirled through chinks in the building. A single fire lit the entire chilly space, and when the young men started coughing they thought it was dust from the mines or chill from the drafts. Not enough orange juice to drink. Not enough comfort, their mamas were wringing their hands in worry 5,000 miles away. But they weren’t just barks, these coughs. They were bites. The young men had one of those diseases that are whispered frantically, with accentuated vowels and hands pressed to clammy cheeks. The young men died in their sleep one night and then got up to work the next day, because they were hard working young men, upstanding young men, young men who wanted to work their thin way forward in the world that they knew (on an only slight wavering path to wife, children, land).  They got up every morning just like usual for a few months until they realized no one was giving them any more orders. The living men in caves went ahead and did their own mucking, they drilled further into the rock and clamped their mouths shut and examined holes in the cave walls when the young men tried to speak to them. Amongst themselves, they spoke in whispers, heads turned toward one another in unending question, fear, awe, and eventually acceptance. They decided to stay.   The Valley was showing them even more colors now, even more than the normal Summer reds and golds and purples. They didn’t want to miss the hummingbird winged people, and the balls of light that surrounded the living caught their attention for weeks at a time. The Valley was a nice place to be forever, when you didn’t have to work in the dark for twelve hours. So they stayed, and stay still to this day, and watch.

Copyright Gary R. Johnson Photography

What I Have

I have a handful of archival photographs from a digital archive.

I have the memory of picking blueberries and watching the sun disappear and the clouds turning into sentient beings.

I have the memory of peeking in windows.

I have the memory of being toured around inside the buildings.

I have memories six years old, one year old, and they live in me, my husband, my son.

I have the knowledge that some men died in the top floor of the main building. I have this picture of my son in that spot:

Copyright Gary R. Johnson Photography

I have a lot.

I have a little bit.

I have a lot of work to do.

And I like to work, so that’s good. I like these people who have been so brave as to call themselves forward. It’s time to get to work (again).

Listening to the Crickets

My God how I love these whispers in the dark, these ancient voices pushing me forward. Sometimes to look at old photos, at old memories, at strong women and kind men is enough to send me just where I need to be to continue the stories that have been given to me. I need to remember to sit and listen, to not force or push, to be kind to my characters and let them do the talking. It’s all right if they’re quiet some days and noisy on others; aren’t we as solid characters just like that? I’d rather hear their genuine thoughts and actions than fabricate something hollow. Their lives (though of course fictional, merely vapors), are too important for me to shove them onto the stage before they’re fully prepared.

I’m about to embark on a short (probably) period of time when I’m going to have solid blocks of my day to be able to write and do nothing but write. Yes, I have my evenings, but by the evening my mind is either lucid and slightly manic or it’s so very sleeeeeepy from a busy day with a busier child (lately children).  This is a luxury I haven’t had since before my son was born; but back then I had very little to write about, and my thoughts and creativity were filled with mostly vapid things. I pray that during this gifted time that I can properly listen and interpret the whispers in the dark, the secret languages, and the music of the evening stars that visit me. That my neurons fire correctly and that I don’t spend my time on things that aren’t worth my while when I should be “listening to the crickets”*.

So pardon this brief interruption: hopefully I will be back with more excerpts of the stories I’ve barely nudged along here. Hopefully I can explain how marble drugstore counters felt to Adam when he was a bory. How he used to run the length of them with his long hands several times before stopping, and especially how he took exactly three large breaths as he did so, so he could fully smell the ice cream cones just waiting behind the counter. Maybe I’ll be gifted more eloquence. I hope so. I need to do right by these fine people. I feel like they would do the same for me.

*”Listening to the crickets”: When I was quite small and living in Marietta, Georgia, I had a bit of an obsession with hiding. My father was out-of-town during the week and when he returned on the weekend, my mother would have us run, hide, and surprise him. I couldn’t stop playing the game, and hid so well that on more than one occasion the whole neighborhood was looking for me. One muggy summer evening, my sister Barbara found me hiding in some juniper bushes (I remember their heady, sticky smell). When asked what I was doing, why hadn’t I answered, everyone was so worried etc etc I replied, “I was listening to the crickets. They were talking to me.” I use this memory and that term (coined by four year old me) to describe my behavior and state of mind when I get into a creative stupor. I hope to listen to the crickets often in the coming weeks.

A snippet of conversation (since I've just a snippet of time)

“A few months before I came up here, while I was still pondering whether to come here at all, I had a dream that was so lucid I could feel my feet in my shoes and my shoes on the floor.” Adam looks up at Justine from between his fingers, they’re sitting at the formica table that the mine furnished Justine and Blake’s cottage with. It’s green and blue flecked with shimmering gold and Justine says out loud that she hates it but deep down thinks it looks like the ocean.

“Have you ever had a dream like that, Justine?” What he means to be conversational is turning into another one of their epic talks. One of those that last the whole hour and end with Justine crying and then grabbing Adam’s face in her hands. She kisses him with the same lips that she will use to greet Blake after the five o’clock whistle and Adam wanders if she kisses Blake with as much slobbery passion. He pretends that she doesn’t.