Our next reading will be one week from tonight
in this auditorium, and the reader will be the poet Tenney
Nathanson.
The week following Mr. Nathanson's reading,
we will go to a different auditorium
at a different night, so I'd like to announce that twice.
It'll be Thursday, October 9th in the Harvill auditorium.
The Harvill building is at 2nd and Olive,
and the auditorium is very hard to find.
And you go down inside, and that's about all
I can really tell you.
It's very confusing, so look for the crowd.
And don't come by yourself.
It's kind of weird over there.
[AUDIENCE LAUGHTER]
No, I'm serious.
It's weird over there.
I hope you can stay after the reading
tonight and have some refreshments,
and meet Ron Hansen.
We're very happy to have him on the faculty this year
teaching fiction classes.
Yeah, lots of people are happy.
He's published two novels.
The first, Desperadoes, the second
in 1983, The Assassination of Jesse James
by the Coward Robert Ford, which many of you
may have heard on Radio Reader, National Public Ra--
the work's been nominated for a PEN/Faulkner Award for fiction.
His children's book, The Shadowmaker,
will be published soon by Harper and Row,
and he's edited an anthology of contemporary short fiction
called Love Stories, which will be published next year.
His short fiction essays and reviews
have appeared in such places as Esquire, the Atlantic Monthly,
the Iowa Review, the New York Times Book Review,
and many other magazines.
His work has been translated into Finnish, Dutch,
and Hebrews--
and Hebrew.
[AUDIENCE LAUGHTER]
I'm getting more and more like Tank McNamara,
I can't stand it.
[LAUGHTER]
In more ways than one.
His honors include a Wallace Stegner Creative Writing
Fellowship from Stanford and a National Endowment
for the Arts Fellowship.
It's a pleasure to introduce Ron Hansen to you.
[APPLAUSE]
I'm going to read two Nebraska stories.
The first is "True Romance."
And you have to imagine that Sissy Spacek is reading this
to you.
It's based on some experiences when I lived in Nebraska,
and there was some slaughter of cattle
in the outlying districts and people were speculating
as to what caused that.
And I was remembering a time when
I was in a fishing resort in Minnesota
and was trapped inside because of rain,
and was forced to read romance magazines over and over again,
because that was the only thing that was available.
And I thought of combining those two events.
"True Romance."
It was still night out, and my husband
was shaving at the kitchen sink so he
could hear the morning farm report,
and I was peeling bacon into the skillet.
I hardly slept a wink with Gina acting up
and that croupy cough of hers.
I must have walked five miles.
Half of Ivan's face was hanging in the circle mirror.
The razor was scraping the soap from his cheek
and pigs weren't dollaring like they ought to.
And that was when the phone rang and it
was Annette, my very best friend,
giving me the woeful news.
Ivan squeaked his thumb on the glass
to spy the temperature, still cold,
then wiped his face with a paper towel,
staring at me with puzzlement as I made
known my shock and surprise.
I took the phone away from my ear
and said, "honey, somebody's killed one of the cows."
He rushed over to the phone and got
to talking to Annette's husband, Slick.
Slick saw it coming from work.
Slick's mainly on night shift at the Caterpillar plant.
Our section of the county is on a party line.
The snoops were getting their usual earful.
I turned out the fire under the skillet.
His appetite would be spoiled.
Ivan and Slick went over the same ground again.
I poured coffee and sugar, and stirred a spoon around
in a cup just as blue as I could be, and when Ivan hung up,
I handed the cup to him.
He said, "I could almost understand it
if they took the meat, but Slick says
it looks like it just plain ripped apart."
I walked the telephone back to the living room
and switched on every single light.
Ivan wasn't saying anything.
I opened my robe and gave Gina the left nipple, which
wasn't so standing out and sore, and I sat in the big chair
under a shawl.
I got the feeling that eyes were on me.
Ivan stood in the doorway in his underpants and Nebraska
sweatshirt looking just like he did in high school.
I said, "I'm just sick about the cow."
He said, "you pay your bills, you try and live simple,
you pray to the Lord for guidance,
but Satan can still find a loophole, can't he?
He'll trip you up every time."
"Just the idea of it has given me the willies," I said.
Ivan put his coffee cup on the floor
and snapped on his gray coveralls.
He sat against the high chair.
"I guess I'll give the Sheriff a call
and then go look at the damage."
"I want to go with you, OK?"
The man from the rendering plant swerved a winch truck
up the pasture until the swinging chain
cradle was over the cow.
His tires skidded green swipes and grass that
was otherwise white with frost.
I scrunched up in the pickup with a heater
going to beat the band and Gina asleep on the seat.
Ivan slumped in the Sheriff's car and swore out a complaint.
The man from the rendering plant threw some hydraulic levers
and the engine revved to unspool some cable,
making the cradle clang against the bumper.
I'd never seen the field so pretty in March.
Every acre was green winter wheat or plowed earth
or sandhills the color of camels.
The lagoon was as black and sleek as a grand piano.
Gina squinted her face up and then discovered a knuckle
to chew as the truck engine raced again,
and when the renderer hoisted the cow up,
a whole stream of stuff poured out of her
and dumped on the ground like boots.
I slaughtered one or two in my time.
I could tell which organs were missing.
Ivan made his weary way up the hill
on grass that was greasy with blood, then
squatted to look at footprints that were all walked over
by cattle.
The man from the plant said something and Ivan said
something back, calling him Dale,
and then Ivan slammed the pickup door behind him.
He wiped the fog from inside the windshield with a softball cap.
"You didn't bring coffee, did you?"
I shook my head as he blew on his fingers.
He asked, "What good are you then?"
But he was smiling.
He said, "I'm glad our insurance is paid up."
"I'm just sick about it," I said.
Ivan put the truck in gear and drove it
past the feed and cattle, giving them a look over.
"I've got to get my sugar beets in."
I thought, the cow's heart and the female things.
Around noon Annette came over in Slick's Trans Am,
and we ate pecan rolls hot from the oven
as she got the romance magazines out of her grocery bag
and began reading me the really good stories.
Gina played on the carpet next to my chair.
You have to watch the little bugger every second
because she'll put it in her mouth what most people wouldn't
step on.
Annette was four months pregnant,
but it hardly showed, just the top snap of her jeans
was undone.
And I was full of uncertainty about the outcome.
Our daytime visits give us the opportunity
to speak candidly about things like miscarriages
or the ways in which we are ironing out
our problems with our husbands, but on this occasion,
Annette was giggling about some goofy woman who
couldn't figure out why marriage turned good men into monsters.
And I got the ugly feeling that I was being
looked at by a Peeping Tom.
Annette put the magazine in her lap
and rapidly flipped pages to get to the part where the story was
continued, and I gingerly picked up Gina
and without saying a peep to Annette,
walked across the carpet and spun around.
Annette giggled and said, "do you suppose
this actually happened?"
And I said yes, pulling my little girl tight against me.
Annette said, "doesn't she just crack you up?"
And I simply kept peering out the window.
I couldn't stop myself.
That night I took another stroll around the property
and then poured diet cola into a glass at the kitchen sink,
satisfying my thirst.
I could see the light of the 60 watt bulb
in the barn and the cows standing up to the fence,
and rubbing their throats and chins.
The wire gets shaggy with the stuff,
looks just like orange doll hair.
Ivan got on the intercom, and his voice
was puny like it was trapped in a paper cup.
"Come on out and help me, will you, Riva?"
"Right out," is what I said.
I tucked another blanket around Gina in the baby crib
and clumped outside in Ivan's rubber boots.
They jingled as I crossed the barnyard.
The cattle stared at me.
One of the steers got up on a lady and triumphed for a while,
but she walked away and he dropped.
My flashlight speared whenever I bumped it.
Ivan was kneeling on straw, shoving his arm
in a rubber glove.
An alarm clock was on the sill.
His softball cap was off, and his long brown hair
was flying wild as he squatted beside the side laying cow.
Her tail whisked a board, so he tied it to her leg with twine.
She was swollen wide with a calf.
My husband reached up inside her,
and the cow lifted her head indignantly and settled down
and chewed her tongue.
Ivan said, "P-U, cow, you stink!"
He was in her up to her bicep, seemed like.
"You going to cut her?"
He shook his head as he snagged the glove off and plunked it
down in the water bucket.
"Dang calf's kaput!"
He glared at his medicine box and said, "how many is that?"
Four out of eight?
I might as well give it up."
I swayed the flashlight beam along the barn.
Window, apron, pitchfork, rope, lug wrench,
sickle, baling wire, and another four pane window
that was so streaked with pigeon goop it
might as well have been slats.
But it was there that the light caught
a glint of an eye and my heart stopped.
I stepped closer to persuade myself
it wasn't just an apparition, and what
I saw abruptly disappeared.
Ivan grinded the tractor ignition
and got the thing going, then raced it
backwards into the barn, not shutting the engine down,
but slapping it out of gear and hopping down to the ground.
He said, "swing that flashlight down on this cow's contraption,
will you, Riva?"
And there was some messy tugging and wrestling
as he yanked the calf's legs out and attached him
to the tractor hitch with wire.
He jumped up to the spring seat and jerked into granny,
creeping forward with his gaze on the cow.
She groaned with agony and more leg
appeared, and then the shut-eyed calf head.
My husband crawled the tractor forward more,
and the calf came out in the surge.
I suctioned gunk out of its throat with a bulb syringe
and squirted it into the straw, but the calf
didn't quiver or pant.
She was as patient as meat, and her tongue
spilled on to the paint tarp.
Ivan scowled and sank to his knees by the calf.
The mother cow struggled up and sniffed the calf,
and began licking off its nose the way she'd been taught.
But even she gave up in a second or two
and hung her head low with grief.
"Do you know what killed it?"
Ivan just gaped and said, "you explain it."
He got up and plunged his arms into the water bucket.
He smeared water on his face.
I crouched down and saw that the calf was somehow split open
and all her insides were pulled out.
After the sheriff and the man from the rendering
plant paid their visits, the night was just about shot.
Ivan completed his cold weather chores,
upsetting the cattle with his earliness,
and I pored over Annette's romance magazines,
gaining support from each disappointment.
Ivan and I got some sleep, and even Gina
cooperated by being good as can be.
Ivan arose at noon, but he was cranky and understandably
depressed about our calamities, so I switched off
All My Children, and suggested we go over to Slick's place
and wake him up and party.
Annette saw I was out of sorts right away,
and she generously agreed to make our supper.
She could see through me like glass.
At two we watched General Hospital,
which was getting crazier by the week according to Annette.
She thought they'd be off in outer space next,
but I said they were just keeping up
with this wild and woolly world we live in.
Once our story was over, we made pork roast and boiled potatoes
with chives and garlic butter, which proved to be a big hit.
Our husbands worked through the remaining light of day,
crawling over Slick's farm machinery,
each with wrenches in his pockets
and grease on his skin like war paint.
Annette said, "you're doing all right for yourself,
aren't you, Riva?"
"I could say the same for you, you know."
Here I ought to explain that Annette went steady with Ivan
in our sophomore year, and I suspect she's always
regretted giving him to me.
If I am any judge of character, her thoughts
were on that subject as we stood at the counter
and Slick and Ivan came in for supper
and cleaned up in the washroom that's off the kitchen.
Annette then had the gall to say, "Slick
and me are going through what you and Ivan were
a couple of months ago."
Oh, no, you're not, I wanted to say.
But I didn't even give her the courtesy of a reply.
"You got everything straightened out though, didn't you?"
I said, "our problems were a blessing in disguise."
"I know exactly what you mean," she said.
"Our marriage is as full of love and vitality
as any girl could wish for."
Her eyes were even a little misty.
"I'm so happy for you, Riva."
And she was.
You could tell she wasn't pretending
like she was during some of the rocky spots in our past.
Slick dipped his tongue in a spoon
that he lifted from a saucepan and went out of his way
to compliment Annette, unlike at least one husband
I could mention.
Ivan pushed down the spring gizmo on the toaster
and got the feeling back in his fingers
by working them over the toaster slots.
My husband said in that put down way of his,
"Slick was saying it could be UFOs."
"I've got an open mind on the subject,"
said Slick, and Ivan did his snickering thing.
I asked if we could please change
the topic of conversation to something
a little more pleasant.
Ivan gave me his angry smile.
"Such as what?
Relationships?"
Slick and Annette were in rare form that night,
but Ivan was pretty much of a poop
until Slick gave him a number.
Ivan bogarted the joint and Slick rolled up
another, and by the time Annette and I got the dishes
into the sink, the men were swapping
a roach on the living room floor and tooling Gina's playthings
around.
Annette opened the newspaper to the place
that showed which dopey program was on the TV that evening.
Slick asked if I haven't planted the marijuana seeds gave us,
and Ivan shrugged, which meant no.
Slick commenced tickling Annette.
She scooched back against the sofa
and fought him off, slapping at his paws and pleading for help.
She screamed, "Slick, you're going
to make me pee on myself!"
Ivan clicked through the channels,
but he was so stoned all he could say was "what is that?"
[AUDIENCE LAUGHTER]
Annette giggled, but got out, "Creature
from the Black Lagoon."
I plopped Gina on top of her daddy's stomach
and passed around a roach that was pinched with a hairpin.
I asked Ivan, "are you really ripped?"
And Ivan shrugged, which meant yes.
The movie was a real shot in the arm for our crew.
My husband rested his pestered head in my lap,
and I rearranged his long hair.
There was a close up of the creature
and I got such a case of the stares from looking at it,
you'd think I was making a photograph.
Ivan shifted to frown at me.
"How come you're not saying anything?"
And I could only reply, "I'm just really ripped."
Days passed without event, and I could persuade myself
that the creature had gone off to greener pastures, however
one evening when Ivan was attending
a meeting of the parish council, my consternation
only grew stronger.
Gina and I got home from the grocery store,
and I parked the pick up close by the feedlot,
so I could hear if she squalled as I was forking out silage.
Hunger was making the cattle ornery.
They straggled over and jostled each other,
resting their long jaws on each other's shoulders,
bawling mom in the night.
And the calves lurched and stared
as I closed the gate behind me.
I collared my face from the cold,
and as I was getting into the truck,
a cry like you hear at a slaughterhouse flew up
from the lagoon.
I thought, "I ought to ignore it,"
or "I ought to go to the phone."
But I figured what I really ought
to do is make certain that I was seeing everything right,
that I wasn't making things up.
Famous last words.
I snuggled Gina in the baby crib and went out along the pasture
road looking at the 8 o'clock night that
was closing in all around me.
I glided down over a hill and a stray calf
flung its tail in my headlights as its tiny mind chugged
through its options.
A yard away, its mother was on her side
and swollen up big as two hay bales.
I got out into the spring cold and inspected the cow even
though I knew she was a goner.
And then I looked at the woods and at the moonlighted lagoon,
and I could make out just enough of a blacker image
to put two and two together and see
that it was the creature dragging
cow guts through the grass.
And the gun rack only carried fishing rods on it,
but there was an angel food cake knife wedged
behind the pickup's toolbox, and that was what
I took with me on my quest.
My scalp prickling with fright and goosebumps
on every inch of me.
The chill was mean, like you'd slapped
your hand against gravel.
The wind seemed to gnaw at the trees.
"You're making it up," I kept praying,
and when I approached the lagoon and saw nothing,
I was pleased and full of hope.
The phone rang many times the next day,
but I wouldn't get up to answer it.
I stayed in the room upstairs, hugging the pillow like a body,
aching for the beginning of some other life,
like a girl in a Rosemary Rogers book.
Once again, Annette provided an escape from my doldrums
by speeding over in the orange Trans Am.
Her concern for me and her eternal spunk
are always a great boost for my spirits.
I washed up and went outside with Gina and Annette
said, "what on earth is wrong with your phone?"
I only said, "I was hoping you'd come over,"
And Annette slammed the car door.
She hugged me like a girlfriend, and the plastic
over the porch screens popped.
The wind was making mincemeat of the open garbage can,
and yet we sat outside on the porch steps
with some of Slick's dope rolled in zigzag papers.
I zipped Gina into a parka with the wind so blustery.
She was trying to walk.
She'd throw her arms out and buck ahead a step or two,
and then plumped down hard on her butt.
The marijuana wasn't rolled tight enough
and the paper was sticking all the time to my lip.
I looked at the barn, the silo, the road,
seeing nothing of the creature, seeing only my husband urging
the tractor up out of a ditch with Slick
straddling the gangplow's hookups and hoses.
Slick's a master at hydraulics.
The plow swung wide and banged as Ivan established his right
to the road.
Then Ivan shifted the throttle up
and mud flew up from the tires.
One gloved hand rested on a fender lamp,
and he looked past me to our daughter,
scowling and acting put out.
Then they'd return to the yard and Annette waved.
Ivan lifted his right index finger just a tad,
his greeting, then turned the steering wheel hand over hand,
bouncing higher in the spring seat as Slick clung
on for dear life.
Annette said, "my baby isn't Ivan's, you know."
I guess I sighed with remembering
of those painful times.
Annette said, "I'm glad we were able to stay friends."
"Me too," I said, and I scooched out
to see my little girl with an angel food cake
knife in her hands, waddling over to me.
I yelled, "Gina, you little snot!
Where'd you get that?"
She gave it to me and wiped her hands on her coat.
"Dut," Gina said, and though my husband would probably
have reprimanded her, I knelt down and told her
how she mustn't play with knives and what a good girl she
was to bring it right to me.
She didn't listen for very long, and I put the knife
in my sweater pocket for the time being.
Annette was looking peculiar, and I
could tell she wanted an explanation,
but then there was a commotion in the cattle pen,
and we looked to where Ivan and Slick were
pushing cow rumps aside in order to get close to the trough.
They glared at something on the ground out there,
and I glanced at the cake knife again,
seeing the unmistakable signs of blood.
"I'm going out to the cattle pen," I imparted.
"You keep Gina with you."
Annette said, "I hope your stock is OK."
The day was on the wane as I proceeded across the yard
and onto the cow path inside the pen.
The cake knife gripped in my right hand
within my sweater pocket.
The cattle were rubbing against the fence
and ignorantly surging toward the silage and the feed trough.
Slick was saying, "you ought to get a photograph, Ivan."
My husband kept his eyes on one spot, his gloved hands
on his hips, his left boot experimenting by moving
something I couldn't see.
I got the cattle to part by tilting against him
with all my weight.
They were heavy as Cadillacs, and I made my toilsome way
to my husband's side only to be greeted
with a look of ill tidings, and with an inquiry that
was to justify all my grim forebodings.
He asked, "do you know how it happened, Riva?"
I regarded ground that was soggy of blood
and saw the green creature that I'd so fervently prayed
was long gone.
He was lying on his scaly back, and his yellow eyes
were glowering as if the being were still
enraged over the many stabbings into his heart.
Death had been good for his general attractiveness,
glossing over as many physical flaws,
and giving him a childlike quality that
tugged at my sympathy.
Again, Ivan nudged the being with his boot,
acting like it was no more than a cow,
and asking me with great dismay, "how the dang thing could kill,
do you think?"
And I said, "love.
Love killed it.
Love is sharp as a knife."
Slick gazed upon me strangely, and my husband looked at me
with grief as I sank to the earth among the cattle,
feeling the warmth of their breathing.
I knew then that the anguish I'd experienced
over those past many months was going to disappear
and that my life, over which I despaired for so long,
was going to keep changing and improving
with each minute of the day.
Thank you.
[APPLAUSE]
Thanks.
This second story is in a different mode.
It was stimulated by a request from Prairie Schooner.
They're doing a special issue on Nebraska,
and they decided to contact all the Nebraska authors they could
think of, and Wright Morris was busy
and Willa Cather wasn't picking up the phone, I guess.
And I was the third, and so I wrote
something that was kind of used as the prologue for the issue.
It's simply called Nebraska.
The town is Americus, Covenant, Denmark, Grange, Hooray,
Jerusalem, Sweetwater.
One of the lesser known moons of the Platte,
conceived in sickness and misery by European pioneers
who took the path of least resistance,
and put down roots in an emptiness
like the one they kept secret in their youth.
In Swedish and Danish and German and Polish and anxiety and fury
and God's Providence, they chopped out the Great Plains
with spades, creating green sod houses that
crumbled and collapsed in the rain
and disappeared in the first persuasive snow,
and were so low, the grown-ups stooped to go inside.
And yet, were places of ownership
and a hard kind of happiness.
The places their occupants gravely stood before,
on those plenary occasions when photographs were taken.
And then the Union Pacific stopped by,
just a camp of white campaign tents,
and a boy playing his harpoon at night.
And then a supply store, a depot,
a pine water tank, stockyards, and the mean prosperity
of the 20th century.
The train strolling into town to shed a boxcar in the depot side
yard, or crying past at 60 miles per hour,
possibly interrupting a girl in her high wire act,
her arms looping up when she tips to one side.
The rail top is slippery as a silver spoon.
And then the yellow and red locomotive
rises up from the heat shimmer over a mile away.
The August noonday warping the sight of it,
but cinders tapping away from the spikes and the iron
rails already vibrating up inside the girl's shoes.
She steps down to the roadbed and then
into high weeds as the Union Pacific pulls Wyoming coal
and Georgia-Pacific lumber, and snow plow blades
and the slant Japanese pickup trucks
through the green open countryside and on to Omaha.
And when it passes by, a worker she knows
is opposite her, like a pedestrian at a stoplight.
The sun not letting up, the plainsong
of grasshoppers going on and on between them,
until the worker says, "hot."
Twice the Union Pacific tracks cross
over the sidewinding Democrat.
The water, slow as an ox cart, green as silage,
croplands to the east, yards and houses to the west.
A green ceiling of leaves in some places.
Whirlpools showing up in it like spinning plates
that lose speed and disappear.
And winter in a week or more of just above zero,
high school couples walk the gray ice, kicking up snow
as quiet words are passed between them.
Opinions are mildly compromised.
Sorrows are apportioned.
And Emil Jedlicka unslings his blue-stocked .22 and slogs
through high brown weeds and snow,
hunting ring-necked pheasant, sidelong rabbits and--
always suddenly-- quail, as his little brother Orin sprints
across the Democrat in order to slide like an otter.
July in town is a gray highway and a Ford hay
truck spraying by.
The hay sailing like the yellow ribbon
caught in the mouth of a prancing dog,
and Billy Awalt up there on the camel's hump, 18 years old
and sweaty and dirty, peppered and dappled with hay dust,
a lump of chew like an extra thumb under his lower lip.
His blue eyes happening on a Dairy Queen and a pretty girl
licking a pale trickle of ice cream from the cone.
And Billy slaps his heart and cries, "oh, I am pierced!"
And late October is orange on the ground and blue overhead,
and grain silos stacked up like white poker chips,
and a high silver water tower belittled one night
by the sloppy tattoo of one year's class
at George W. Norris High.
And below the silos and water tower are stripped treetops,
their gray limbs still lifted up in alleluia.
Their yellow leaves crowding along yard fences
and sheeping along the sidewalks and alleys
under the shepherding wind.
Or January, and a heavy snow partitioning the landscape,
whiting out the highways and woods and cattle lots
until there are only open spaces and steamed up window panes.
And a Nordstrom boy limping pitifully
in the hard plaster of his clothes, in a snow park
are meant to be green and a snow cap meant to be purple.
The snow is deep as his hips when the boy tips over
and cannot get up until the little Schumacher girl,
sitting by the stoop window, a spoon in her mouth,
a bowl of Cheerios in her lap, says in plain voice,
"there's a boy," and her mother looks out to the sidewalk.
Houses are big and white and two stories high,
each a cousin to the next, with pigeon roosts in the attic
gables, green storm windows on the upper floor,
and a green screened porch, some as pillowed and couched
as parlors or made into sleeping rooms for the boy whose
next step will be the Navy, and days spent on a ship
with his hometown's own population,
on gray water that rises up and is allayed
like a geography of cornfields, sugar beets, soybeans, wheat,
that stays there and says in its own way, "stay."
Houses are turned away from the land
and toward whatever is not always,
sitting across from each other like dressed up
children at a party in daylight, their parents looking
on with hopes and fond expectations.
Overgrown elm and sycamore trees poached the sunlight
from the lawns and keep petticoats of snow
around them until April.
In the deep lots outback are wire clothes lines
with flapping white sheets pinned to them.
Property lines are hedged with sour green and purple grapes,
or with rabbit wire and gardens of peonies, roses, gladiola,
irises, marigolds, pansies.
Fruit trees are so closely planted that they cannot sway
without knitting.
The apples and cherries drop and sweetly
decompose until there are only slight brown bumps
in the yards, but the pears stay up in the wind,
drooping under the pecks of birds,
withering down like peppers until their passion
and sorrow is justly noticed, and they one day disappear.
Aligned against an alley of blue shale rock
is a garage whose doors slash weeds and scrape up
pebbles, as an old man pokily swings them open, teetering
with his last week push.
And then Victor Johnson rummages inside,
being cautious about his gray sweater
and high topped boots, looking over paint cans,
junked electric motors, grass rakes, and garden rakes,
and pitchforks, and sickles, gray doors and ladders
piled overhead in the rafters, and an old windup Victrola
and heavy platter records from the twenties.
On one of them a soprano singing,
"I'm a lonesome melody."
Under a green tarpaulin is a wooden movie projector
he painted silver, and big cans of tan celluloid,
much of it orange and green with age,
but one strip of it preserved, of an army pilot in jodhpurs
hopping from one biplane and onto another's upper wing.
Country people who had paid to see the movie
had been spellbound by the slight dip
of the wings at the pilot's jump,
the slap of his leather jacket, and how
his hair strayed wild and was promptly slicked back
by the wind.
But looking at the strip now, pulling a ribbon of it
up to the window pane and letting
it unspool to the ground, Victor can only
make out 20 flame frames of the leap
and then snapshot after snapshot of an army pilot clinging
to the biplanes wing, and yet Victor stays with it
as though that scene of one man staying alive
was what he paid his nickel for.
Main Street is just a block away.
Pickup trucks stop in it so their drivers
can angle out over their brown left arms
and speak about crops, or praise the weather,
or make up sentences whose only real point is
their lack of complication.
And then a cattle truck comes by and they a mosey along
with a touch of their cap bills or a slap of the door metal.
High school girls in skintight jeans
stay in one place on weekends and jacked up
cars cruise past, rowdy farm boys overlapping
inside, pulling over now and then in order
to give the girls cigarettes and sips of pop, and grief
about their lipstick.
And when the cars peel out the girls say
how a particular boy measured up,
or they swap gossip about Donna Moriarty and the scope
she permitted Randy when he came back from boot camp.
Everyone is famous in this town and everyone is necessary.
Townspeople go to the Vaughn grocery
store for the daily news and to the home restaurant for history
class, especially at evensong when the old people eat gravy
pot roast and lemon meringue pies,
and calmly sip coffee from cups they tip to their mouths
with both hands.
The Kiwanis Club meets here on Tuesday nights
and hopes are made public, petty sins are tidily dispatched,
the proceeds from the gumball machines
are tallied up and poured into the upkeep of a playground.
Yutesler's Hardware Store has picnic items and kitchen
appliances in its one window, in the manner
of those prosperous men who would prefer
to be known for their hobbies.
And there is one crisp, white Protestant church
with a steeple of the sort pictured on calendars,
and the Immaculate Conception Catholic Church
grayly holding the town at bay like a Gothic wolfhound.
And there is an insurance agency, a county coroner
and justice of the peace, a second hand shop,
a handsome chiropractor named Cook
who coaches the Pony League Baseball team.
A post office approached on unpainted wood steps
outside of a cheap mobile home.
The Nighthawk tavern, where there's
Falstaff tap beer, a green pool table, a poster recording
the Cornhusker scores, a crazy man patiently tolerated,
a gray haired woman with an unmoored eye,
a boy in spectacles thick as paperweights,
a carpenter missing one index finger,
a plump waitress whose day job is in a basement beauty shop,
and an old woman who creeps up to the side door at eight
in order to purchase one shot glass of whiskey.
And yet passing by and paying attention,
an outsider is only aware of what isn't, that there
is no bookshop, no picture show, no pharmacy, or dry cleaners.
No cocktail parties, extreme opinions, jewelry or piano
stores, motels, hotels, hospital,
political headquarters, travel agencies, art galleries,
European fashions, philosophical theories about being
and the soul.
High importance is only attached to practicalities,
and so there is the Bachelor Funeral Home,
where a proud old gentleman is on display
in a dark brown suit.
His yellow fingernails finally clean, his smeared eyeglasses
in his coat pocket, a grandchild on tiptoes
by the casket peering at the lips that will not move,
the sparrow chest that will not rise.
And there's Tommy Seymour's for Sinclair gasoline
and mechanical repairs, a green balloon dinosaur bobbing
from a string over the cash register,
old tires piled up beneath the Cottonwood,
for sale in the side yard, a Case tractor, a John Deere
reaper, a hay mower, a red manure spreader,
and a rusty grain conveyor.
Green weeds overcoming them, standing up inside them,
trying slyly and little by little
to inherit machinery for the earth.
And beyond that are woods, a slope of pasture,
six empty cattle pens, a driveway
made of limestone pebbles, and the house
where Alice Sorenson pages through a child's World Book
Encyclopedia.
Stopping at the descriptions of California,
Cape Town, Ceylon, Colorado, Copenhagen, Corpus Christi,
Costa Rica, Cyprus.
Widow Dworak has been watering the lawn in an open raincoat
and apron, but at nine she walks the green hose around
to the spigot and screws down the nozzle
so that the spray is a misty crystal ball, softly baptizing
the ivy.
She says, "how about some chamomile tea?"
And she says, "yum.
Oh, boy, that hits the spot," and bends
to shut the water off.
The Union Pacific night train rolls
through town just after 10 o'clock,
when a 60-year-old man named Adolph Schooley is a boy again
in bed, and when the huge weight of 40 or 50 cars
jostles his upstairs room like a motor he'd put a quarter in.
And over the sighing industry of the train he can hear the train
saying, "Nebraska, Nebraska, Nebraska, Nebraska,"
and he cannot sleep.
Mrs. Antoinette Heft is at the Home restaurant,
placing frozen meat patties on wax paper,
pausing at times to clamp her fingers under her arms,
and press the sting from them.
She stops when the Union Pacific passes then
picks a cigarette out of a pack of Kools
and smokes it on the back porch, smelling air
as crisp as Oxydol, looking up at stars the Pawnee
Indians looked at, hearing the low harmonica of big rigs
on the highway in the town she knows
like the palm of her hand, in the country she knows by heart.
Thank you.
[APPLAUSE]