North Carolina Literature in a Global Context
N C L R ONLINE
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COURTESY OF ASHEVILLE ART MUSEUM COLLECTION, GIFT OF THE ARTIST, 2008.43.04.20
“Little brother,” he said. Malachi could smell hot mash on his breath, like nitro, dangerous both in the mines and out. Always was anyway, for Jesse. “You come to make sure I wouldn’t be here tomorrow? No scab?” “I just came to pick you up.” “Yeah right,” said Jesse, his chapped lips crackling toward a smile. Malachi shrugged, his head down. “Car’s over there,” he said, nodding. Their parents’ old Cutlass kicked over on the third try. Malachi gunned the motor to keep it running. Black smoke roared from the tailpipe. The road down from the mine was crooked and steep, the guardrail mangled or busted-through at old moments of wreckage, the thin metal torqued and scream-twisted into jags that could slice your finger. Men had died on this road, drunk or crazed or high. Others run off, some said.
Malachi looked at Jesse. His brother was looking the other way, toward the mountain walling them in on that side: angular planes of blasted rock, overlaid gridlines, an exposed mapwork of inchwide drill grooves where the dynamite had been seated to blast the mountain for a road. “You couldn’t believe these tunnels they had,” said Jesse. “Who?” “The Viet Cong.” Jesse shook his head. “This whole universe underneath the ground. They had field hospitals down there, armories, underground temples. Meanwhile we bombed hell out of the jungle with the fifty-twos, doing shit-all.” Malachi had heard about the tunnels from a local boy who’d been drafted, then come home early with a missing leg. He’d heard Jesse had been one of the ones they sent down there, underground, just a flashlight and his platoon leader’s .45. A tunnel rat. But this was the first time his brother had hinted at his tour, the details. “So they put you down there all alone?” he asked. Jesse didn’t say anything. He was staring out the window at the passing mountainside, naked-blown pale, and barren, like a wall of exposed bone. Finally he nodded. “Shoulder-tight down there, lot of the time,” he said. “For them little gooks to fit, you know. I was least afraid of being underground, a course.” He skimmed his bottom lip with his teeth, as if about to say something else. He didn’t. Through the windshield before them more hills, sharp ridges of them bluing into the distance like eroded ramparts, the late-fallen daylight spilling across them in ragged tracings that quivered like something that could just dry up, be gone for all time.
JOHN URBAIN (1920–2009) was born in Brussels, Belgium. In 1922, he moved with his parents to Detroit, MI. Drafted into the US Army in 1941 as an infantry corporal, he saw action at the Battle of the Bulge, was wounded, and upon his return to the US, began his studies at Black Mountain College on the GI Bill. While there, he studied under Josef Albers and met his future wife and fellow artist, Elaine Schmidt. The couple moved to Paris and studied art at the Academie de la Grande
Chaumiere and the Academie Julien. Upon their return to the US in 1953, he became the art director for the Phillip Morris Company, where he remained until his retirement. His work is in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, the National Gallery of Art, the Brooklyn Museum of Art, the Houston Museum of Fine Arts, the North Carolina Museum of Art, and the Asheville Art Museum, as well as in numerous private collections in the US and abroad.
Night Path, 1973 (oil painting and collage, 39.25 x29.5) by John Urbain
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HIS BROTHER WAS LOOKING THE OTHER WAY, TOWARD THE MOUNTAIN WALLING THEM IN . . .