Last Cards

THE LAST CARDS

LOWERING
We tend to forget we are creatures sensitive to winds and tides, low pressure and high, sun and rain. The language knows it: a bright and sunny disposition; the ebbing of strength; a lowering gaze. Perhaps astrology, as an almanac of change, a record of likely atmospheres, is useful in predicting possible behaviours according to a sunny, or a rainy day. If the position of the stars were predicated by accurate weather reports, the hour of birth in low pressure or high might well forecast future responses.

CASSEROLE
Thank you so much for the lovely casserole dish! What a thoughtful gift, under the circumstances. There was something in it, looked like it might’ve been some sort of food. Foreign looking. I know there was garlic. But that’s all right, washed up good as new. Thank you so much. It’s perfect for my Tuna Noodle Supreme. I add the water, you know.

Simple. Some choose to be simple, letting go of abstracts they see as lines of pain.

UP N DOWN
the attitude of inescapable responsibility to one’s tenants, a well developed sensitivity in the Scots, administered the Empire. The use of the morning room allowed the upstairs servants the dignity of privacy as they emptied pots and ashes. Servants were attached to estate tenancies with the same continuity, sometimes more, than the family. Miniature autocracies, they could be benevolent or tyrannous, according to the master’s spleen.

“When I am frightened I find it a good thing to have somebody to be angry with for not being brave: it warms the blood.” Mrs. Meyerick to Deronda, pg.526

FALLOWFIELD

The Farrier over in Lakeside. A Carravagio; black-eyed, grimy, unshaven pissed-off little man. In my mind’s eye, shorter than Jack. Must’ve had an incredible musculature, because he wasn’t tall enough for leverage. I knew what a fallow field was, and I interpreted his anger as reaction to his name being treated as a joke by farmers who resented the necessity of a fallow field as money spent; farmers who squatted smoking around his fire while he straightened their twisted implements. Did I already love iron? its weight in the hand like some ideal of body weight, considering what part of my body was usually in my hand. How much new metal did he ever sell to frugal men who brought him their inheritances of tongue irons, share plates and hinges? Did he resent them watching him work? something he could never do to them: you don’t watch a farmer, you lend a hand, or leave.

Norm
90% do it this way
10% do it that way
We look at the 90% and say ‘That’s the norm, that’s normal’
We look at the 10% and say ‘That’s not normal, it has to change’.
In the absense of history, we don’t know that the 10% is always there,
and just as much a norm as the 90.

We see a bull with his herd of cows. Why don’t we see a herd of cows with their bull?
Primogeniture happened when it became necessary to groom the first-born to defend the family, the first-born male, because defense depended on physical strength. The family had to be ‘his’ to encourage the tenacity of the herd bull. Primogeniture in the male line leads to patriarchy.

re: new Kawartha Lakes Region highway signs – c. “…to advertize the fact that the Kawarthas are a great place to work and vacation” note: not live, but work.
re: kid rescue from South Africa/ K.C.Kolby- “…an adventure that touched three land continents.”

MISSION STATEMENT
Surrounded by Hostiles stop send reinforcements stop. Brebouf.

The glut of information saps the energy of the system, the unconscious filing system overworks and overflows, the lines are overloaded, a conscious request for information is unheeded by a busy synapse = a seniors’ moment. If the technology survives, we’re going to need a bigger brain.

Notice that the ‘C’ level talent (ie. CEOs, etc.), like victims, receive not pay, but ‘compensation’.

THOSE WOMEN
Those women who react to the offer of a cup of ordinary tea as if you’re trying to fatten them, or hinted a nip at the muscatel with the cook.
Stereotypes don’t happen in real life, except in the shadows.
If you’re not apologizing for being male, you’re not liberated, apparently.

Just trying to make Barbara laugh.

Western culture, the white man the indian so despises, once operated with the same primitive sensitivity to the animal world as the redman does. The bullock slaughtered before the altar of the god was being propitiated and the god thanked. God is great/God is good/and we thank Him for this food, is a child’s grace over the roasted haunch shared out by the priest. A sick liver could well portend great damage to the herd of beasts, or of men. And any number of sacrifices will need to be made in patriotic defence. Yet, one might suspect dire warnings of national disaster from a greedy priest deprived of his pate.

COWBOYS AND COWGIRLS….notes on novels

Katya
Saami’s not gonna pup.

Katya’s desperate for something to organize. No grandchild/ she needs the orchestra.

Fishing/Paul’s Dad
I lost interest in fishing when it stopped being a stick and string and one old hook, when it got fussy and finicking, old-maidish with fragile glass poles, nylon lines on reticulating reels, whole sewing baskets full of feathered fancies, suddenly a simple clumsy out-door boy thing became brittle, sharp

Heavy work
I’m not sayin’ I can’t do the heavy work anymore, I can still sling a bag of kibble, though a hundredweight of oats takes preparation. The point seems to be that my body just wants to go slower, down another gear, and stop every hundred yards.

Central Casting
Ang.Cow has no central character. Life has no central character. What causes a centrality in life are relationships of blood, gender, usefulness, accident, the things called fate, coincidence, predestination, convergence.
The central idea of Ang.Cow 2 is, that in losing and finding relationships for all of these reasons, we are all central characters in our own minds.

Cowboys
Finale: Kath. has begun to draw Sam, sexy lines.
Geo. wants Bea and poss. Tillie on Board of SSO (of course Velma will want aboard too)
Tillie at Supper organizes for Kath. to do a series of paintings for a fundraiser for the SSO and since it also involves Rev. Ross and the church, a Biblical theme should be appropriate. EH! Of course they’ll avoid telling Kath. that Eliz. is involved.

Do the paintings pay for a house, or for an oboe?????

****Flaubert was lucky/smart, he didn’t have to explain himself to Emma Bovary. Or did he? Is that why he used a dead Carthaginian queen next? (Salambo)

DAVID CUTS
He knew he’d been a head-banger, had beaten his head against the end wall of his baby crib, and he hadn’t forgotten because his mother had often said so, with recurring mild dismay. He said he knew because he could hold the picture in his mind of the green-papered room, the brown tin crib, snarled yellow blanket, himself on his knees banging. When he told it, people would make faces and nod knowingly. Someone, usually a girl with child care credentials, would insist it had to be his mother’s picture as she entered by the door. But his mother had never mentioned his teddy bear and David knew where it had lain, killed beneath the blanket.
Impossible to know, of course, why he was where he was, soaking alone in a foot of tepid water in a studio apartment fifteen floors a… Studio? Studying what, the masochism of putting my vertigo to the test? I already know the result of that; my waist’s dropped to my hips for ballast and I’m waddling in my jeans fifteen floors over a Loblaws that cashes welfare cheques and sells Double Devon on top of I don’t know how many depths of parked cars, concrete tunnels, dripping sewers, bloating rats, dead rubbers, rubbies and bloody needles… God! Pinned to the city’s cold grey heart.
David had never been a cornerboy, himself. He’d grown up amidst solid old houses and sidewalks, the nearest candy an adventure out across mainstreet, no babies allowed. And when he got to play hooky, well, you stay out of sight playing poker and pool, no hanging on corners. He knew he had no experience of the festering social boils that streetcorners apparently were, and though he could convince himself that he could slip by the Sharks and the Jets, he wasn’t so sure of the Crips and the Bloods. After all, corners are where we used to hang people and bury them in the road to discourage whatever it was they were up to.
Check out under Bay and Barb in Bertfile (followed by another copy of Whore and Dwarf)\
The only man worth having’s one leaves you with a good memory, ‘cause you know he’ll take the highroad. He’ll be off and gone before you. Weak hearts, mostly. And livers.
She can double the facts of misfortune before she gets to the end of the sentence.

CHECK NEW GEORGE doc. for Paul’s Dad.

Suicide Bea
A woman who traumatizes herself
The one in the middle between Do and Don’t,
She’s the Worrier Bea
Recurring suicidal thoughts/contrasted with
Maude’s obsession which is just for fun (?)
So it should be Maude who points it out about
Bea__ Takes one to know one.

Folk Hero / Folk Villain (find Hannah Bell)
If she wanted to, she could show you Charlemagne in the family tree, but she wouldn’t dwell on it.
“You’re nothing but pure… hired help!” J.A. (Jan.25/20′)
Yup, I’m the one they hire.

BOB ROSS
chose the ministry, in part, for the clothes. He’d once seen himself a bishop, indeed, had indulged himself in a chain of serendipidy that sat him in full fig on the Canturbury throne. But he developed early trouble with whiskey and golf, loving the former, hating the latter, an imbalance of passions unfavourable to a political churchman. So, he turned his back on the lure of the see for the life of the country parson, and having been posted to the rim of civilization, found himself watering the vestry wine and went native, marrying Anna McGee of the Strawbridge Hardware McGees. This was in the days before the coming of the Canadian Tire thrust that family into a scramble of rapacity and greed from which it emerged as the ‘Grocery McGees, them bastards’.
He made do for the most part on visiting sherries, and sought comfort in corduroy and tragic sopranos. A good man who tried not to judge what he didn’t understand, he was an intelligent man who had come to believe in instinct, and so adopted a dotty Church of England manner that predated any involvement with guitars. It allowed him a moral tone and enough pedantry to employ the proper parables which were, really, sufficiently instructive and saved him the humiliation of the modern homily. Leaning on the Good Samaritan, he sensibly avoided the Marriage at Cana, deeming notice of compassion more important than of water being wine.
A weaker man would have gone High Church, slipping into cassocks and the naming of saints’ days, at least for the comings and goings of seasons, offering an all-day liturgy to those with a tooth for God. However, Bob Ross enjoyed sitting to his sermons, the thinking and the crafting of them, much more than standing and delivering. The reading, the writing, the choosing of music to frame the service managed, with a measured beat of heart, to dull and make safe the sharp edge of his vision. For he too often saw the world as transparent, vein and sinew, and the urge to blood, to sacrifice and to read the truth in entrails for the sake of a terminally confused humanity made him thirsty.

Bob Ross envied Jack Nairn, the Presbyterian minister. Jack was a son of a local dairy farm, for four generations a going concern, though not the biggest. The biggest was a proud investment of breeding bulls, put together with money, the Nairn place was family-raised and butterfat records were their pride. An icecream recipe for the strawberry season had come into the family with Jack’s greatgrandmother Gourlay and had become the festive occasion once a year for the entertainment of the countryside. While the men milked and the boys dug the last of the winter’s ice from the straw, the girls picked and cleaned quart after quart of berries, sneaking sugar from the pantry for a giggling orgy of dipping out of sight of the women pinching piecrusts in the summer kitchen. draped with fly cloths and left in the heat to quicken

PAUL CUTS
It’s Fate’s fault; the Misses Knit, Ravel and Snip astir on their cosmic rockers, or off, meddling like grandmothers, knotting and purling, having second thoughts, using scissors.

Of course, it was obvious that squatters had the same rush of blood to the vitals, strutting straight off the bus and after the best axe in the crowd, a man for the roof and a man for the babies and when they’ve gone you can get another to mind the stove. And they bitch about guys spreading it around.

GEORGE CUTS

A good thing he hadn’’t wanted children. This world was no place to be dynastic in, not for any child of Elizabeth’s and his, too sensitive, artificial and brittle by half, far better to let the strain die out before it became seriously self-destructive and ended in a burden of madness. He had seen enough of frailty over-bred into family and friends not to volunteer offspring for a life of clinics and wards.
It would have mattered to his father, Henry would have wept to see his oak-lined life destined for the auctioneer. But Henry was dead and wouldn’t know, and besides, there was a cousin who’d bred a pair of aggressive brokers, so the name was safe, no matter the reputation.
If anything, George supposed he might be missing children just for the sake of having something other than his wife to worry about, after all, the strain of his job was so familiar and so constrained by paradigms of expectation and behaviour, that beyond the limits of his desk and boardrooms, there was little that necessarily occupied his mind. His wife was plucking at the bed sheet falling from his shoulder.

Not a few readers, who had in fact been present at the reception in the bank foyer, would be pleased to have an explanation, and one, of course, which confirmed their own considered judgement. One or two people would tell friends that the Dragonlady had finally flipped, burnt down the house and thrown herself onto the sword, but there are always one or two who look for the worst light. George found it faintly amusing that he could have reassured the naysayers, old Monteith chief amongst them, that his wife had never once thrown herself onto the point of his sword.

George most often despaired of ever scratching a single mark of his own design upon the world when he was sincerely thanked for his good breeding. It left him lonesome and too often in need of a drink.

Elizabeth had discovered that what she could take she could usually keep, her only punishment being Maude’s sarcasm, metaphors of having her nose rubbed in it, bizarre notions of an unpolished sister and therefore dismissable as jealousy. So, Elizabeth, arriving on the shores of conspicuous possession, raised her standard and started having the furniture placed. It all fit, George saw the picture the moment he knew she’d never been spanked. (from pg.

afraid of blowing up against the strain of letting go, and letting go, the readyness to sleep into, die into, one last pissing-out. Some kind of compensation, I suppose, the relief of knowing you’ve passed early prep for the final leak. Pass water, pass away, pass go, what a way we have with words. Y’ get old, y’ take a leak and it’s an orgasm of the soul. I still hate it. (from pg. 383)

it felt stubble and soft and then oily, his bones all marrow, his mind clinging in baggy lumps of suet out for birds, his feet swelling in their thick socks. Hanging his face in his hands, he smelled the rot of organs rising on his breath. He tasted dead, gums shrinking to rid remnants of teeth. His tongue, burnt and cankered, considered turning on itself and stopping breath. ( from pg. 73)

By some people, George’s mother, Marie, had been a mistake. Her family name was Hubbard, as in cupboard, but some of those who cared for such things were sure the family wasn’t far from rhyming with ‘le gar’, Marie Angelique Therèse being the evidence. Henry, George’s father, had found her in Montreal. He on an extended apprenticeship in the banking house of a friend of his father’s and she on the gently social rounds of a sugar merchant’s daughter met over tea and a sandwich in a Westmount garden. His life looked honourable, her life appeared to need comfortable shoes. She had an eye for the man under the loose-fitted bag of his suit, and he, with only Toronto to compare, was willing to believe her Emma Bovary come to life and dismissed all memories of bony Jarvis women from his eye.
As Mennonites coming to town tend to fade from black to blue and mild Lutheranism, so Marie’s family had been bleached by wealth to a vague, lapsed Catholicism that allowed her to marry on Anglican ground. The bitterly old, the spinsterish and the greedy considered the match unholy, scandalous and doomed. Henry’s father was pleased to examine a bundle of wax-sealed certificates. Marie’s father was pleased to be shut of a daughter whose body made him nervous. Both mothers shook hands over the Irish linens and a pair of ormolu encrusted breakfronts licensed as real Louis, and by the time Henry Muir Preston brought Marie Angelique Therèse back to Toronto, he had taken to calling her Mat. Some people said he used her initials to avoid the fact she wasn’t one of them. One of the Jarvis girls claimed it was short for mattress and not a few of the young men in their set, having met the young wife, were inclined to agree.
Marie was dark with black pelted hair pinned high into a thick, inviting hassock, and yet she was fair with a pink hard-candy skin which shone on her wide temple bones and glowed on the flesh of her throat. She appeared to be small and was bodiced to prove it, but some feeling of size, of width, perhaps capacity, breathed deeply behind the shirtwaists, the boleros, the drapery skirts. Ordering her house quietly, she moved almost soundlessly in it, wore a pinafore in the day, gingham or striped ticking, allowed a girl in to sweep and wash and roll the Irish sheets through a mad and monstrous mangle, and wore gloves to do her own polishing, caring for the gloves with the same patience she gave to patina.
Stolid, staid, the house had been built for a bureaucrat who had earned some money tipping contracts in the right direction. Perhaps the voracious execution of the contracts, for the supply of harness horses to the Imperial Army in France, showed him the future, perhaps disassociation reassured him; he had erased a coachhouse from the blueprints and attached a garage instead. All of mud brown brick, stone linteled, with generous bedrooms, a diningroom panelled in walnut, a parlour long and comfortable, though the fireplace was of the same brown, felted-looking brick, the house sat gracefully, if heavily, shaded by towering chestnuts on smooth green. The bureaucrat had been struck down by the milkman’s nag running from a swarm of bees. Henry’s father had relieved the widow of her burden and made it his wedding gift to Henry and Marie.
When he was very small, sometimes for a treat, George was allowed to sit quietly in his chair by the pantry door and watch his mother methodically manufacture a meal. She lifted a ladle, raised a pot lid as other women handled mirror and brush, but there was nothing flamboyant except for one or two flavours foreign to the neighbourhood, some tarragon Henry planted for her in the back garden, a taste of garlic where it wouldn’t be noticed. Marie resorted to a brittle-papered recipe book only to calculate weight into time for an unusual roast. She was a natural cook and a simple one who prepared and shaped food with the concentration and sureness of a potter, her meals ought to have been reuseable.
Two short windows in the high walls of her kitchen, one on the west between banks of cupboards, one above the iron sink and deeply shaded by a glassed porch on the north, jellied the light reflected from the olive painted cupboards and drawers and bins, from the emerald and white checker floor, from the jersey cream and the apple green enamel of the baking table and of the new coal-fired range. The dark little man who came to do with the ashes had never learned to swim and always found himself short of breath in the kitchen, glad to retreat to the furnace room with his scuttle and a tea towel full of yesterday’s baking. Even the range fired in August could never quite overbear the cool aspic air.
Not long after he’d learned to walk, George discovered that he could stop in the kitchen to ask his mother a question and stay until she answered it. He would try to string together every why he could think of, but Marie would focus her round black eyes on the cowlick on the crest of his head and tell him not to be silly, that he was just talking to be heard. George would shove the swing door to make it slam, which it was too well designed ever to do, would stamp along the muffling hall runner to the front stairs and climb each broad tread on the seat of his pants, thinking furiously; he would kneel on the landing, pretending for a breathless moment that he’d heard her call; in his bedroom he’d open the door to his toy shelves, stare at the drawn ranks of lead soldiers, the neat stack of puzzle boxes, the mechanical construction pieces in their green compartmented crate and think, think desperately of a smart question.
Henry walked down to business every morning, a longish hike that was considered eccentric, but no one denied that the lean man striding in loose-fitted worsted was healthy and attractive and not a few women put out the milk bottles at sight of him passing, and set potatoes to boil upon his return. On a few very bad winter days which didn’t improve by noon, Henry would telephone to Mat and it would be arranged for the ash man to wash carefully at the basement sink, to spread an old sheet kept clean for the purpose over the high plush seat of the blue McLaughlan and slowly, one hand hovering between wheel and brake, to steer his way down the snow deep streets to meet Henry at the close of business. Once there, the ash man, whose name was Mister McCormack to everyone who employed him, would move the sheet and himself to the backseat, careful to kick snow and horse dung from his nailed boots, and Henry would lightly grip the big wheel with chamois gloved hands and navigate back on a long roundabout tour of waterfront and river road, slithering, dodging, coasting over the snow on the understanding that he was avoiding the steepest hills, the impossibly slippery direct way home. It was an understanding which Mister McCormack in the comfort of the backseat never doubted. At the powdery boom of the garage doors banging open, Marie would set coffee on the front of the stove and lay two trays with butter, apple jelly and new biscuits. George was given charge of one tray to place it just beyond the heat of the parlour fire, the other tray was for the table below the window, next the fruit cellar door.
The men would stomp and steam through the side door, snorting and blowing with satisfaction, and Marie would accept Henry’s coat in one hand, pass the tray to Mister McCormack with the other. Henry would poke his cold nose in her ear to kiss her cheek and she would pat him away, that the ash man shouldn’t turn on the stairs and see. And Henry, excusing himself from George, would take whisky out of one of the breakfronts, pour a tumblerful, and in a fit of remembering some detail of necessary instruction would make a trip through the kitchen to the cellar absently bearing the glass and avoiding Mat’s eye. The glass would return, rinsed, on the tray handed up from the stairs and Marie would wink at George, but she never spoke to Henry of his awkward friendship. (from pg. 73)

George could see the chipped enamel corner of his mother’s baking table, his father’s gray pantleg between parlour fire and tea table, the burl and ormolu on the open cabinet door, Henry’s long fine fingers cupped round heavy-bottomed crystal, the mystery of his mother’s body’s stillness beneath his father bending to her ear. And he caught his mother’s wink.

IT’S NOT FAIR
he said as he poured the drink he didn’t notice.

BAY BARRELL
The sun was yellow, flat to the sill and pouring light across the kitchen table as Bay Barrell laid a black jack on a red queen and thought she’d better get the horses fed before people started to show up for this do. She stared into the sun through glass as safely grimed as smoked lens and wondered what the hell she’d gotten herself into.
“Bay, a real party, think about it! Just like the old days, music all over the house, out in the yard, out…”
“Not in the barn they’re not! Nobody goes near the stable and not into the pasture, either.”
“Okay, okay, I’ll make some signs, that’s easy. But what d’ you think, good idea?”
“Nobody goes near the horses.”
“For sure. Nobody goes near the horses. So, what d’ you think?”
“Who?”
“Oh, Jesus, Bay, everybody wants a party, it’s been so long. You’ve got the town and half the county with their tongues hanging out for an excuse.
Bay had shaken her great head and snorted derision, “Who the hell are you talking about for music?”
“Oh. Everybody, Carl, Willie, Joey, if he’s not too far from the wagon, Ronnie, if he’s around and she lets him. They’re all begging to come. And these great guys who played the Slip and Slop last week… Unbelievable guitar! You’ll love him, absolutely ace, wiry little guy walks his bass like… You’ll love him. And the porkchop doing vocals, Bay… oh, unh, you’ll want him. Kinda rasta, but just style, hair’s actually clean and everything matches. Listen, I’ll come out and do a clean-up…”
Bay lurched to her feet with a shove on the chair and an open-palm rest on the round rim of the table; her leg cables trembled with tension, straining up at a big silver belt buckle as her weight came to bear and subsided to balance of a kind. She eyed the patience deck, only one housed, and left it lie. The columned cards, red, black, red, looked like an incantation to order in the rubble of the room.
Shuffling across a narrow path on the gritty floorboards, through sixty years of joyful acquisitiveness that considered very few things disposable, she plucked a grubby blue flannel shirt from a heap on the back of a chair that hadn’t seen light for…? Well, somebody must have sat there once, surely. You couldn’t get at the other two chairs (she thought there should be two) hidden under and behind papers and clothes, bottles and boxes, hardware and harness, sacks of dogfood, sacks of catfood, sacks of sacks, a sack of socks and a stack of cider in cans. She reached four carrots from a bag at her feet, poked them into a pocket of her khaki shorts, flailed into the flannel, hauled up a sock on a sandaled foot, cast an eye about the room, naming cobwebs as she looked, and shuffled for the door, “Clean up? My ass!”
Jerking out the old work glove that wedged the door to the jamb, she passed through to the summer kitchen, catching the door again with a practiced flip of the glove and a tug on the rusted-out knob. A pair of shepherds, the dog huge and handsome, his bitch of a sister worried and wolfish, attended underfoot by a bologna roll of a grizzled old basset, all wagged, muttered, arfed and bowed, happy to see her under any circumstances.
Her hand half down a paper sack of milk bones, Bay changed her mind and rummaged instead into the warming shelf of a dead cook stove, pulling from behind a ratty black squirrel mounted on a stick, a butcher’s package of over-ripe pig feet and handed them round. The dogs carried the high, rank smell of rotting hocks out to the yard and Bay tossed the the styrofoam tray onto a fly-blown stack atop the kennel boxes and headed out the dog-yard gate. The basset, a border collie on his mother’s side, managed to double his stake when the big shepherd looked up to watch the woman cross to the horsebarn.
Standing straight, Bay could be six three, so the horse-sized doors appeared in scale as she drew the bolt and turned the patent handle latch. The buckskin backstepped, lips whickering, head tossing his pleasure back to his mother out in the muck yard. Missy raised her head from a study of yesterday’s hay and nodded hello. A small, tidy cat wove her affection back and forth between George’s nervous forelegs, keeping an eye on Bay who ran a hand down the gelding’s nose and an eye over his thoroughbred sealskin hide.
Bay Barrell was named for her mother’s favourite steeds; big ginger horse flesh and, of course, her father, a man her mother always said she’d married for his last name because it sounded like a ranch.
Bay’s father had much prefered boats, so she was taught to do for herself on the lake at the summerhouse.
But her father didn’t come back from the war, so, with her mother she rode, she jumped and she hunted to hounds.

We handed her round on New Year’s Eve, each of us held her for a little while, hefted her and admired her weight. There were three of us, two had known her in life, the other held her for the first time and fell in love with her story. She did so love a good listener.
AMBLE HOME

When she said, make sure you get these when I’m gone, stepping from her jeans, showing the flannel lining, and there’s another pair never out of the bag somewhere in that heap at the end of the bed, it was certain then, no denial, and so gently given I didn’t even stall for breath as I went to make us tea.
When she raised an arm over the bedrail at the picture on the wall, and said, that has to go, I nodded, suggested and hung next day two cowpokes with horses, and stood the offender back of some hospital flowers she was tolerating for the occasion.
When she raised a finger to the window and said those have to go, I said the valances certainly and I’ll hunt up something plainer for drapes, and we grinned to have it in our plans, and not to have to do it.
When she raised her chin to dismiss her shopping catalogues, I must have paled with fear for one more joy shut out, until she smiled and said, not on this much morphine.
When she mounted and rode, I’d stepped out for duty and missed her final fence, but she hadn’t yet shied in the length and we shared a faith in grace and breeding, the dam, the sire and courage would tell at the jump, and then she was over, and the chase was done.
When Science wouldn’t take her, too tall they said, her last best joke, couldn’t go to university, wouldn’t fit the drawer, we got the bones. Well, not bones, but ash, so she rode home in a cardboard box and had to sit on the couch for a couple of days for she wouldn’t fit the red porphyry jar, the brass-bound box, or the silver jug, but a dig down a midden of glazed polyesters and moused wool unearthed her mother’s writing desk and under the lid she went.
We handed her round on New Year’s Eve, each of us held her a while, hefted her and admired her weight. There were three of us, two had known her in life, the other held her for the first time and fell in love with her story. She gave him a drink, settled back and said, “Did I ever tell you_________

THE PUTDOWN

“Well it’s time,” she said, no drama, no punctuation, “call the vet.”
The vet’d been by the week before to see to the safety of bridles, to the length of the passage, to the width of doors and the height of the sill, to room for the truck in the yard, and he came to see the help. The help heard what was important and they shook hands on that. “Call me when she’s ready. If you have to.”
“I will. I’ll have to. Not much time left. She thinks it best they go before she does. Mare’s old, and he’s too big and spoiled. Even so.” Just men, they nodded and waved in the lane.
When she said it, he called, and the vet said, “Well then. Thursday morning. You’ll put them in.”
“I’ll feed them in overnight. It’s cold enough she doesn’t mind. He’ll follow.”
“Right then.”
“In the morning.”
In the morning he set her up with her cold tea and water, morphine and a tonic in place of the gin that climbed too high on the oxygen, sweetened her teeth under the tap, offered yoghurt within reach, and took coffee and a piece of the paper out to the rocker in a spike of cold sun for a cigarette.
The dogs greeted the car as any car, shied from the black leather bag, and were shut in the yard while the vet stepped in for a final say. There wasn’t a word on the way to the barn.
A whicker of joy for oats in the morning, and a jab in the neck once the bridles were on, and the way was clear from the box to the hay-soft floor. There was no time to stumble. They came with muttered encouragement to stand wobble-footed for the punch that would thunder them down like walls collapsing. Iscariot is no saint, sorrow and shame overwhelmed the sacrifice, and only shared grace maintained the men through a second act that laid back to back, mane to mane, crupper to crupper, mother and son, buckskins in October light, soft spotted light, cedar honey and maple orange.
He made fresh coffee then. The vet took a cup to sit with her till the truck should come. He took his out to find the dogs had slipped the gate and had a smell. Without a word they returned to the yard in lonesome file. He sat on the sill by the high round rumps, the fallen tails, and watched a fly walk withers. No flinch of the mottled satin, no twitch of the long black silk as the fly strolled a new estate, and the childish pain, the eden pain of understanding flooded into tears.
The truck came, winches wound and three faces set against indignity watched the drag. Nods of acceptance sealed the ritual and the truck went. The vet went, with a word and a hand, “She might think it’s enough. Might leave the dogs.”
“Might. I’m holdin’ out.”
“Well, you know where I am.”
“Thanks, Doc. Thankyou.”
He went in to her then. Hands clasped, elbows on her knees she said, “It’s done then.”
“Yah.” He bent to her and they held together in a deep breath.
‘It’s hard.”
“It’s hard.”
“Here then,” she said, “take this,” And from her bag downside the chair she plucked a thousand dollar bill, “go buy a new tv for my bedroom, nineteen inch, remote. A good remote. The Breeders’ Cup runs Saturday.”

Distraction
“Hey! I’m tryin’ to get some work done here.” ___ Damned fly, I can’t focus, gotta kill that fly. I need… End up driving twenty miles, gas, cigarettes, bank, on the way, to buy enough fly tox to do the barn, go for groceries, run into a friend, go for a drink, and during the band’s last set I notice that fly’s finally drowned in a puddle of beer sweat.

GOD
‘We only live, only suspire
Consumed by either fire or fire,’ T.S. Eliot

We must be consumed either by the anger of the storm god or by the love of the living God. There is no way around life and its sufferings. Our only choice is whether we will be consumed by the fire of our own heedless fears and passions or allow God to refine us in his fire and to shape us into a fitting instrument for his revelation…
We need not fear God as we fear all other suffering, which burns and maims and kills. For God’s fire, though it will perfect us, will not destroy, for “the bush was not consumed.” Cahill pg 164.
Card File: Untitled 1
———————

Card File: Untitled 2

———————