PHILLIP GEARHEAR T
Kingfisher
Sciotoville, Ohio
And Splitting the wate Bearing the mess
I agonizt:~ while he was gone, right minded, for a twig.
KATHRYN PALGUTA,Advisor
VINCENT, Editor andLayout
LEANNE KINKER, Assistant Editor JOHN BIGGS, Poetry Editor SHANNAN CARVER& VONALBA PARAZ,ArtEditors BARB COSTAS,Assistant PoetryEditor KATE BROWN, GraphicsAssistant ALLY CHAPMAN
PERRY Staff
The Silhoueneis committed to celebrating the anand idea, of the studentsand faculty ofShawnee State University and ofthe community at large. We welcome submissions ofan, petr, and shorfiction. All correspndence shouldbe directed toEditor,Silhouette, Shawnee State university, 9402nd Steet, Porsmouth, Ohio 45662, or call XXX-XXX-XXXX, or e-mailxxxxxxxx@shawnee.edu.
JENNIFER COPELAN D
Untitled Oil on Canvas, 11" x 14"
McDermott , Ohio
TOM JENNINGS
Victoria s Secret
Portsmouth, Ohio
She,
Of the porn-porn eyes, frizzled halo, Nine months huge and barely twice that old, Malled on the arm of the man in blue
Until she saw the window.
She kneels at the front of her rainbow As Sapphire and Emerald silks
Slither across her breasts and Squeeze her thigh s.
Amethyst, Topaz, Lapis and Citrine
Span her shoulders, And her belly bums Cinnabar.
She bathes in the stream of her sensuous dream, Floats among flowers of foreign parts where Blossoms of Grace glow below spider spun cups, And the cups of her eyes run over.
And Bob said, "Come away, You don't need that stuff."
She blinked.
The waters turned; the flower died; The face crumpled up and fell into its mouth.
Two points. It stepped away, then came to hold tight
The arm of
The man in blue with his wallet on a chain.
ERIC LAYNE
Basement Dre ams
Portsmouth , Ohio
As he entered his tiny square house, Leon let out a deep sigh from between his clenched teeth. He slipped through the dark clutter swiftly, careful not to bump any table comers or to kick any of the many piles of useless refuse or to awaken his ever-irritated wife. He crept past the room where Martha slept. She lay in thick slumber, like a beached whale, awaiting the light of another meaningless day and dreaming of tasty fish.
In stead, Leon made his way to the narrow, battered door that led to the basement. This dim, plain, closet of a cellar he referred to affectionately as "the Den. " It was his sanctuary. He'd spent several years making it a cozy, comfortable, safe place ever since the day that Martha told him to go down there to get an old lamp for her because she had become too large to fit through that wonderfully narrow door.
Leon coll apsed into his worn recliner and flipped on the old Zenith, trying to decide which of the five channels the TV received would be his entertainment that night. He pulled in a long breath of the thick, ancient air that filled the little house and seemed to press down on him always. It tasted dusty and dead. He didn't bother to remove the faded green scrubs he had worn all that day at the hospital. He simply slipped out of his yellowed shoes, pulled off the fake silver Timex with its broken, unmoving second hand, and leaned back and allowed peace and aloneness to absorb him.
Not unlike the door to his haven, Leon was a narrow, lean man of fortynine. His rough strawberry-red hair was now mixed with gray and was s low ly retreating from his forehead, leaving behind it a shining trail of smooth baldness His drawn body was tattooed with freckles. They covered his elongated, delicate hands, the fingernails of which were bitten to mere nubs.
His eyes were the color of the aged silver of the watch that lay in the ashtray on the table beside him. They were pools of sadness that told the story of a life which had somehow taken the wrong exit and, whether it be from fate, or ill luck, was unable to get back on the highway.
He looked around the room at the dead end he had managed to find himself in. He thought about Steven Gibbs, one of the terminally ill patients he cared for at the hospital . He considered Steven one of his few friends and wondered if he knew, if he ever realized, just how well Leon could understand and empathize with him. With his situation. Honestly, what was the difference? Yes, Leon could move. He could go to work every day, and take walks outside, and drive to McDonald 's for a cheeseburger, but he too was trapped and rotting. Oh yes, Leon knew all too well, and enjoyed Steven's company for iL
The floorboard s above his head creaked a biL Leon scoo ped up the watch
and looked at it. Not so much at the time, but at the minutes, the hours, the years ticking away. He thought, as he often did, about his car and the highway. About the pictures he'd seen of Florida on the old Zenith. How big it looked there and how clean. His head hurt from gritting his teeth-a gesture he performed unconsciously and often. "Maybe I'll straighten the house up a bit tomorrow," he whispered to the heavy air, knowing fully well that it would be a futile effort. · As he drifted off to sleep, there in his sunken chair, with the watch resting loosely in his gentle hand, he dreamt of driving. The breezes that whipped into the big Thunderbird's windows were cool and comforting and smelled sweet like freshly tilled earth. The road was open and endless, and he had no maps. And somehow he knew that the man in his passenger seat cared just as little about destinations as he himself did. He knew all too well.
He always woke up feeling tired, older. The days stretched on. He worked his dreary, depressing shifts punctuated only by his occasional visits with Steven. It had become all he really looked forward to. There was a bond between the two men. The kind of friendship only known by prisoners of war, men who had been through times of duress and could share what others would never understand. Every day after they talked and after Leon had checked and adjusted the machines that were keeping him alive, Steven would raise his thinning hand. Leon knew that the act had to be excruciatingly painful for Steven, but also necessary, if only to feel for a moment like they were two old friends in a bar and that life was in fact fair and good.
And then one day, Leon strolled into the sterile, white room, his ye ll owed shoes squeaking softly on the tiles, and Steven was gone. His bed was made up tightly and neatly. The starched pillow lay on the taut, flat sheets. He knew without asking. And in that moment, a strange feeling bloomed inside him. He felt like a tiny, sea-bound vessel whose anchor had suddenly been cut away. As he walked from the room, from the hospital, a though t ran over and over in his mind. "I'm leaving now," he kept telling himself in an oddly surprised voice. "I can leave." A smile curled the comers of his mouth.
The breezes that whipped into the big car's windows were cool and comforting and smelled sweet like freshly tilled earth. As he drove, moving from streets he'd known for years to ones that were new and unfamiliar, Leon felt afraid. But the fear was overshadowed by a great anxiousness. The road was open and endless and he knew not where it might take him. He reached over and dug through the glove compartment to locate the large folded AAA map that he kept there. He looked at it and a laugh escaped him-a sound he had seldom made for the majority of his life.
Rumbling a bit too loud ly, as old cars will sometimes do, the '78 Thunderbird journeyed onward, leaving behind it a short stretch of highway strewn with the remains of a worn road map. Among the pieces, the last of the day's sunlight glinted on a fake silver Timex, discarded, forgotten-its second hand broken and unmoving.
AMANDA MOORE
Tonight, I cry for you
Portsmouth, Ohio
Tonight, I cry for youyou, the motheryou, the woman-
I wonder what goes on behind the soft brown doe eyes that are generations old, eyes that have lived 50 years on-
Yes, tonight, I cry for you-
You who lost a child so young, and I cry tiny violet raindrops on my pillow for your daughter, who at the age of 10, could not cry for a lost brotherhe who lies beneath a cold black stone & grassy dandelions.
A girl who was me.
Yes, tonight, I cry for you.
& I am thinking now, 10 years too late, w/ my own small son sleeping so soundly on my chest, that you, my mother, are a miracle
dead inside, I imagine, but you faltered on w/ out your golden boy, my hurt brother.
You always could, when given dandelions, make some amazing wine.
SHANNAN CARVER
Hidden Child
Black and White Photograph, 8" x 1O"
Portsmouth, Ohio
THOMAS BERTRAND
washing offeet
Portsmouth, Ohio
in this spittle world, there is no muddier a mystery than watching a father die. breathe, lean, roll, spin, sweat, time limes mystiqueshly on. can i delay it, filet it, belay it, change it somehow? mash and mold it to my liking? being the little snot-nosed n iggardly veteran viking i am? i'm not looking for burdens of sympathy, but asking for power and the smoke of cedar that will take me to the edge.
the old man was wired like a tenacious cable bridge, always ferrying me across knee-scabbed waters. i stand and watch him weave in and out of consciousness in the hospital ICU (i sue who?) diet was a mystery in his time. for a navy breakfast, he ate japanese artillery shells in world war two south of sanity pacific. now his heart wouldn't carry out its sailery duties, although it always carried me.
like the great spirit some days moan aloud; fathers day, his birthday, veterans day, the day he died, etc., damn-it-all, etc. after a while , i slowly meditated thoughts of effulgent bread and wine, and begin to half steppingly sense that every day is fathers day. yeah, we pouted and prayed
but, like the old worn moon, who never forgets when it makes a note, we knew. one afternoon, alone with the old man, i apropoed, "come on dad, you can make it." he shook his head "no." reality shifted and the world i knew i knew no more. now i can proudly swear in four or five languages, but like peter's denial problem of three times, that "no" really weathered me: it was my trail of tears to the land of adult exile and i didn't want to go. i guess what pissed me off is he went ahead and died without my permission: conduct unbecoming of a sailor. really, he had permission, i just simulated he didn't. i used to warpedly think he didn't know what the hell he was doing. now i wished i was right.
from the drawer where he kept his wallet, i stole a black leathered moment... alone; smoothed my hand with the grain of wood he was in, his white sailor hat cradled inside, i saluted. the priest honored the last exchange, as everyone else ducked and scattered for emotional asylum in the graveyard limos.
he asked me .in icu to massage his feet. feeling, fleshing the arches that hallowed be life's name, caressing, caring those homeward bound battle ships, mysteries focus to a point. afterwards, i dared not defile my hands with soap. for now i understand the kind of selfless service
the Morning Star taught with ... the washing of feet.
NATHAN BENNINGTON
Untitled Black and White Photograph, 8" x 10"
Lucasville, Ohio
ERIC DEER
Untitled
Ironton, Ohio
The street is cold and cruel in March, when you're fighting a war you can't win by yourself.
With no home of your own, not a dollar to your name, and your clothes are the same for a year. The balls tore out of my jeans and society says everyone has a sad story. My bottle was my only friend, Lady Gin was my sin and she kept me sick, living in open shelters where your only possession is a chair, while waiting for a mat to lay your head and wait to see how tomorrow will punish you. Did I suffer?
Suffer means to endure, get through. Hell yeah I suffered.
But the suffering was brought on by my self and King Alcohol I suffered until I decided to change and I took my first step and I am OK today.
JASON OSBORNE
After Hours
Oil on Tarpaper, 48" x 23 .5"
West Union, Ohio
HEATHER STEVENS
Untitled Oil on Canvas, 3' x 5'
West Portsmouth, Ohio
AMANDA MOORE
Chasing Beethoven
Portsmouth, Ohio
Strange when you think about it, but your sister has never seen the sunset wrinkle around 98-degree Mississippi heat. She's never gotten the chance to look down at her toes peeking out from her sandals, never lain in the backyard to examine clouds shaped like Africa, a train, her own face. She's never seen a giraffe at the zoo when you take her, never glimpsed the Cat in the Hat when you read it to her. But somehow your little sister who co lor s blindly on the concrete porch with her pencil can chase Beethoven on her violin
And we just stare and play the symphony again on the tape deck so she can memorize it; fingers flying, lips smiling, eyes closed.
BE LI NDA MCCANE
Look for the Silver Lining Pen and Ink 8" x 11" ' Peebles, Ohio
DINA RUDICK
I Would That I Weren't So Naked Charcoal on Paper, 23" x 17"
Portsmouth, Ohio
My heart stops And quiver s like a broken thing.
I squirm and avert my eyes, But they find no restful ground.
In them is the raw nerve Seen in all mirrors.
You Who stare back coldly Only tears to refract your reproach.
I would
That I weren 't so naked When faced with this familiar train.
Wooden ribs over steel arrows Shoot through and past me.
I, all apologies, mute.
You, all scars numb.
I would that I weren 't so naked When faced with this familiar train.
JIM FLAVIN My Fathers Anger
Georgetown, Ohio
In a fanuly as large as the one I grew up in during the fifties, two things were plainly visible to even the most distant of our neighbors: a young couple who saddled themselves with seven children (the eighth showed up 16 years after the first) must certainly be Catholic; and with that many mouths in a single household, they must certainly be poor as well.
Both, of course, were accurate surmises on the part of our neighbors No influence comes close to matching the role the church played in our young lives then. Catholics are church goers, and we went to church at the slightest provocation. Sundays were a given Holy days of obligation found the nine and then the ten of us kneeling straight and single file in our Sunday clothes. We were the only family in Sacred Heart parish who took up the entire span of a single pew. An embarrassing fact to those of us old enough to know that, even among Catholics, we were numerically blessed.
But church was not the only house of prayer. Night after night Dad and Mom would usher their band of potential priests and nuns into the cramped space of our Kansas farmhouse living room where we would all kneel onto the cracked linoleum and pray the rosary.
Dad would lead.
"Hail, Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee, blessed art thou among women, and blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus." The other eight of us would follow.
"Holy Mary, mother of God, pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our death. Amen."
Fifty mind-numbing repetitions at the end of a long day.
If a child had misbehaved during the day, he or she would be required to kneel in the middle of the floor while the rest of us leaned for support onto any piece of furniture sturdy enough to shift the weight from our aching knees. But God bless the poor child caught "cheating" by leaning over a chair's tempting cushion in a furtive attempt to take all the weight from the knees.
The back of hand across a rump!
And center stage in the family living room while the rest of us perked up in our responses with an enthusiasm worthy of a novitiate.
As the oldest of my parents' children, I was perhaps more self conscious than the rest of my brothers and sisters. I knew that while we were at home praying the rosary other children lucky enough to be born into Quaker or Baptist or Episcopalian or Methodist families were at home sitting on cushioned chairs and watching The Friday Night Fights or Hopalong Cassidy. At a certain age, I would have traded places with them in a minute, even though to do so would have condemned my Quaker or Baptist or Episcopalian or Methodist soul to hell for all eternity. The ulti-
mate Catholic punishment. But a punishment well worth the chance of watching Hopalong shoot someone who deserved it. Or a middleweight pound an opponent to the floor with un-Christian enthusiasm.
During the years when I was growing up, the Catholic church embraced a rather narrow-minded theology, one we all blindly accepted as our birthright. The Catholic church, we were told, was the one, true church founded by Christ. As Catholics, we would know the joy of God's love in heaven. Those misguided members of other faiths would be barred from Paradise.
For us children this was a truth as natural and as universal as the laws of gravity.
As a Catholic, however, I lived a haunted life, which perhaps made me more critical than was healthy. Even at a young age, a terrible, dark secret scalded my consciousness and made me bitter. Turned all my prayers sour.
I knew that I would one day join my Quaker and Baptist and Episcopalian and Methodist friends in hell. That I would not experience the joy of family companionship in heaven once God called me to account.
The problem lay in my very first confession. The nun who had prepared her first-grade sinners to receive the cleansing grace of the priest's absolution in the confessional assured each one of us that at some time in our lives we had indeed committed a mortal sin. We were, after all, not simply children. We had reached the age of reason. We knew better.
"It is up to each of you," she smiled, "to search your soul and find that one black spot. Were you to die without confessing it, you would certainly go to hell. To purposefully leave it out, to lie in the confessional, is to commit a mortal sin of sacrilege. The punishment for such a sin is to be thrown even deeper into hell. So deep you will not be heard from again."
When Sister came up for breath she nodded. "You want to enjoy eternity with your families in God's embrace. Think long and hard, boys and girls," she smiled. "Bring that mortal crime into the light of God's forgiveness."
Then more gravely she added, "We are sinners, all of us. Look to it!"
And look to it I did. I examined my conscience. My deeds. My thoughts. My words. I looked high. I looked low.
But no mortal sin could I find.
As that first confession approached and I remained blind to my own iniquity, I began to panic. Sister knew I had committed that sin. The priest would know. God, who saw and knew everything, would also know. Arrayed as they were against me, I had no choice but to bow down in supplication, to acknowledge my sinful past, to lie and admit to a crime I did not commit.
So that's what I did. During my first confession I made up a wonderful tale of having stopped naked in front of a mirror to look at myself. Even young I understood that anything that smelled of the naked human body was mortally outrageous to the Catholic Church.
During that first confession I invented a mortal sin so that I, like all the other young sinners in my class, would truly deserve God's grace.
And, of course, in the process I committed, in that first of confessions, a mortal sin of sacrilege which condemned my young, Catholic soul to the deepest,
of hell .
That private assurance that I was condemned from the very beginning to sit out eternity in Satan's embrace made it difficult at best to mirror my father's enthusiasm for worship and prayer.
However, that sense of spiritual isolation was not the only fact of life that contributed to that gnawing self-consciousness I felt as I began to stumble through puberty.
About the time that my voice began to crack on every fourth word-a state of affairs that caused much merriment in the house even during the nightly rosary-I became blushingly aware that my family was dirt poor. I could see it in the 1951 white Chevrolet my father drove, a car not large enough to haul the nine people it cradled on its way to and from church at every opportunity. I could see it in the house we called home White clapboard. Small. Three boys to one bed, and during the winter months when the snow blew, a fine, powdery snow drift there on the foot of the bed. I could see it in the meals my mother scraped together on the table. Lots of bread. Potatoes in any form. Rationed meat. I could hear it, too, in the fights my mother and father would have. Every one occasioned by insufficient funds, a bounced check, or a basic need left unfulfilled.
Even young I began to look for some link between our poverty and our Catholicism. It did not take much imagination to find it.
On one level, we were so poor because we were so many. It seemed a fundamental principle of mathematics. One I marveled that my father and mother had never taken into account as they bred us all into existence.
On another level, I understood, too, that, in part, it was because we were poor that we clung so tenaciously to our Catholic faith . Built into our system of belief was the comforting principle that our suffering in this life was coin to purchase our reward in the next. According to this philosophy, the Flavins would have a high place in heaven indeed.
Everyone, that was, but me.
In silence I shouldered my burden as an outcast and worked, as we all did, to put money in the bank to cover the next check.
Being Catholic and being poor I understood constituted two strikes against my family. The third strike against us lay the fact that we were dairy farmers. Our neighbors managed to make ends meet as wheat farmers.
But we couldn't manage it. We had to farm and milk cows.
Embarrassing.
A dairy cow is a yoke. A shackle to a time clock. Morning and night with the predictability of sunrise and sunset, the cows had to be milked. Rain could not keep us out of the milk barn. Snow could not. Not the heat and flies of summer. Not the spreading sea of shit that slowly blossomed in the pens that surrounded the barns. We walked through them all, if not oblivious to them, at least tolerant.
This was what we did for a living.
But as we children grew older, our tolerance gave way to complaint. It was one thing to be poor and over-worked. It was quite another thing to recognize the injustice of it all. We complained in outrage against the unfairness of fate.
"He who eats here works here," Mother would say, and the complainant , whoever, would bite his or her lip in shame and go back to the work at hand
While friends and neighbors worked their fields in the brilliant light of morning, we milked the cows, then went to work. Work was what we did after chores. Chores were not work. At night we waved from the barnyard to the neighborin g boy s as they drove toward town to play ball. Then we went back to our chores. We worked hard for the living we had. There was no other way to survive . But all was not work. Once, we went to a movie. As a family.
Raintree County.
Mom wanted to see it. Dad was not a moviegoer. In fact, the only other time he had taken Mom to a movie he had stormed out in the middle, charging the film with ungodliness and immorality. Dad fumed in the car while Mom remained in the theater to watch to the end of Gone With the Wind.
Fifteen years later all nine of us packed up into the old Chevy and Dad drove the twenty miles to Mankato, the county seat, to the theater. This was not the Saturday night film Spec Whitley flashed on the post office wall during the summer months that drew all the farm families in for gossip and fun. This was a real theater! Cushioned seats. Aisles. Wide screen. Popcorn. Pop.
For once in our lives the nine Flavins were movie going . Yet the excitement was tinged again, for me, with cruel self-consciousness. I watched as the nine of us unpacked and fell out of the Chevy after Dad parked on Main Street. I watched Dad hand the dollar bills to the woman at the ticket counter. Dollar bills that even then I knew could have bought something else more necessary to our existence. But I watched, too, as Mom smiled and ushered Carol and Sharon in with her, followed by Dad, then Greg, John, Dennis, little Mikey, all of four, and then me. Together we paraded down that darkened aisle, a family on a mission unlike any we had ever been on before. Mom found the aisle, one empty, to hold us all. She led us in. We all followed like we belonged. Carol. Sharon. I watched as Dad, Greg, John, Dennis turned into the aisle.
Then Mikey's tum.
In hindsight, I know exactly what he was thinking. Nine of us together. A trip in the car. Now an aisle. Like church. Little Mikey grabbed the aisle seat rest, genuflected, then walked in.
Mortification settled around me like a coffin as laughter and chuckles accompanied Mikey to his seat. As I settled in beside him, praying for the lights to dim, I understood again how unlike the rest of the world we Flavins really were God had not forgotten that lie in the confessional.
Difference, real or imagined, was not, however, something that bothered Dad. On the road to survival and heaven he hadn't the time to let self-consciousness slow him down. We worked hard. And we prayed harder.
On Sunday morning we always seemed to be late. All of us up at 6:30. No breakfast. The sustenance of communion later. To the barn and the cows. Then home. A quick change of clothes. To the Chevy. Then seven miles to town, the Chevy kicking up pillows of dust behind us as Dad raced toward church. We always seemed to make it. Most Sundays we were the last family to arrive. And
SANDRA ADDIS
Mass would begin just as little Mikey and I bent our knees to the padded kneelers below.
As a Catholic parent with seven, then eight children, my father understood well that body and soul were his responsibility. His commitment to the nightly rosary was one manifestation of that understanding. His insistence on Sunday Mass was another. His sermonizing on the way home was a third.
Whatever the message preached in the Sunday gospel, Dad felt obligated to take up the issue and lecture his children on all relevant principles on the way home from church. While that white Chevrolet could manage speeds of seventy miles an hour on the rock road when we threatened to be late for church, it could never make its way above forty on the way home as Dad extended the morning's sermon in whatever direction his fancy took.
We were a captive audience. Shoulder to shoulder. One sinful soul wedged in tight against the next. It was an opportunity for moral direction Dad could not resist. Wherever the priest had ended, Dad began.
"You may think you can fool your Mom and Dad," he would warn, "but let me tell you this. There's no fooling God. He sees and knows everything. You don 't fool him one bit. If you don't live a life of grace you'll regret it for eternity. It would be a tragedy, a real tragedy, if we all get to heaven but one of us. Who wants to be that one? Don't let it be you."
Of course I hadn't the courage then to admit that I would be the one barred from the family table in heaven by that lie I had told in my first confession In what little room was available to me there in the back seat of that 1951 Chevrolet, I squirmed and fidgeted and wished to God that home would show up soon on the horizon.
Sometimes I thought I hated my father then. Hated his smug certainty about God and His heaven. Hated his own piousness. Hated the fact that he wasn 't like all the other fathers I saw around me. Men who enjoyed life. Who worked hard but understood the need to play as well. Only once in my young life had I tried to share a laugh with my father by telling him a joke I had heard in school.
"There was this baby who had a disease," I recounted, "and the doctor wouldn't let him go to the bathroom for a week. He sent the baby home and told him not to go to the bathroom. On the last day, the mother was fixing dinner and she told the baby, 'You can have peas now.' The baby thought she meant he could go to the bathroom. The baby stood up in the crib and said, 'Head for high ground everyone, here comes the water!"'
To this day I can remember the look of pain that washed across my father 's face. He must have sensed then that my soul was lost. Perhaps he saw that I was going to be the one left out of the family's holiday gatherings in heaven "Jim," he said sadly, "a soldier in the civil war offered to tell Ulysses S. Grant a dirty joke. The general looked at him and said, 'We're men here , son . Men don't tell such jokes."'
Then my father walked away.
When I finished crying in shame, I vowed that that was the last joke I would ever tell to my father. There just seemed to be nothing in him that wasn't focused on eternal salvation. His God seemed absolutely humorless. And so did he.
Sitting in the back of that car on the way home from church, I would feel guilt, too. Guilt because I knew my father was a holy man. He held a family of nine and then ten together with nothing but prayer and hard work. But I, his oldest son, was a sinful degenerate.
All that changed though on a rainy Sunday. We enacted our usual morning ritual. Chores. Home to change into our church clothes. The mad dash to church. Rock road slick from the rain of two days. The Flavin parade into the pew. Mass. The sermon. Oration on the way home. Prodigal squirming in the back. Lost forever from the fold. But home was getting close as Dad began to wind down his own sermon. When he headed the Chevy west I could see relief just ahead.
And cows, too. Lots of cows. Holsteins. The entire milk herd out for a Sunday stroll on the county road.
Maybe it was the strain of two days of rain. Perhaps another bounced check. Or maybe Dad knew that after all of those sermons on Sunday mornings he was finally out of material. Whatever it was, life changed for me that day. For all of us boys.
The Chevy slid to a stop.
"Let's run them in, boys," Dad said.
"They've got their Sunday clothes on," Mom said. "Can't they go home and change first?"
But Dad already had his door open and was stepping out onto the slick road. Mikey and I crawled out from the back seat behind Dad while Greg, John, and Dennis hurried out on the other side. All of us met at the front of the car.
We stared at the cows.
The cows stared at us.
"Walk slow," Dad suggested. "Maybe they'll go back in the same way they came out."
To the south we could see barbed wire sagging to the ground between posts and footsteps in the soft earth where the herd had walked through the fence. ·
Together, the six of us, dressed in our Sunday best, fanned out along the muddy road and began to walk toward the cows.
The lead cow staring at us was a Holstein named Rosie. She was the heaviest milker of the lot. But she was independent to boot. She watched warily as we walked slowly toward her.
"Coo, boss," Dad said firmly but softly. "Coo, boss."
He was trying to lure her into accepting his authority, into understanding the error of her ways so that she would retreat along the path of righteousness and return to the pasture. But Rosie would have none of it. When Dad's third footstep sounded in the soft mud, Rosie turned north toward the open alfalfa field, heaved her clumsy body over the water that ran torrid in the ditch, then led the entire herd in open revolt through the mud.
His authority lost, Dad exploded that Sunday morning in angry protest.
"You sonsofbitches!" he cried into the after-church air, "I'll turn you around if it's the last goddamn thing I do!"
With a wild flail of his arms he charged from the road to the ditch, like Rosie before him heaving himself over the still torridly running water, but unlike Rosie, he failed to completely negotiate the water. His right foot, decked in Sunday sock and
shoe, disappeared into the muddy water.
"Goddamn!" he sang again in the morning air. "Get them boys!"
Suddenly remembering his five sons, Dad turned to encourage us on , but he was clearly unprepared for what he saw. All of us, from Little Mikey up to me, stood rooted to the mud road . Shocked to hear our father use words that could condemn him to hell.
But hell was of little consequence, it now seemed, as the family's livelihood high-tailed it toward town across a neighbor's muddy field of alfalfa. "Are you all going to stand there like idiots, or are you going to work. damn it!" D ad cried.
It was enough to shatter our paralysis, · All of us, Little Mikey included , shot across the ditch in pursuit of the cows. Neck ti~s flying in the wind. Mud clinging to our Sunday shoes. ·
Dad did not lead the chase for long. I passed him Then Greg. Then John as Dad slowed to catch his breath.
Greg's was the first of the boys' voices to break the air with profanity.
"Come back here, you bastards!" he cried.
In that childish cry of profanity, liberation blossomed in the Kansas air. I could feel the chains of oppression snap . I watched them crumble with the weight of lies into the wet, fragrant earth.
"Your asses are in big trouble!" I shouted, prodigal no more.
"You sons of bitches!" John cried, running free beside me.
"Bastards and sonsofbitches!" Dennis chimed in from someplace close behind.
And then softly in the distance, his voice pure and sweet as a choir boy's, Little Mikey sang out, "You sonsofbastards are in big trouble now!"
We ran . We shouted. We sang in joyous profanity as we turned those cows at last toward home. I followed behind those cows in what I thought was a new and wonderful sense of self. Both my own and my family's. I felt a joy then that I don't think I had ever felt before. One perhaps I have never felt since .
Even Dad seemed to sense it as he slipped and slid toward the repair job at the fence.
"I don't suppose," he offered sheepishly to none of his five sons in particular, "the Lord ever chased cows. If he had ... he might have allowed a man a little more freedom with his tongue."
After tacking up some wire, Dad looked back toward the car where Mom, Carol, and Sharon sat in what seemed at the time stunned silence. "Enough for now," he said. "Let's go home and shed these church clothes. "
And we did.
One single Sunday morning indulgence in profanity had freed me from the fires of hell. Or at least my childhood fear of them . I basked in the cleansing joy of my father's anger.
ELI PALMER Pained Figure
Stoneware, 6.5" x 6"
Portsmouth, Ohio
I derived the main source of inspiration for this piece from "The Scream" by Edvard Munch. I was trying to depict the entire range of human emotions that deal with mental anguish. I was not focusing on physical pain, which in my experience can be dealt with more easily, but the emotional agony we all experience and learn to deal with as we gain life experience.
We all know the depression caused by the loss of a loved one; the heartbreak of losing a lover; the stress caused by being pressed to study for exams, complete research papers, maintain good grades , get a degree , or just to complete a class. Of course everyone, no matter how amiable, will eventually meet someone who proves to be difficult. Moreover, because of this difficult person's status and the power he or she wields, the stress factor is greatly amplified. Soon, life becomes living hell. Pain, suffering, embarrassment, anxiety, and fear are all emotions that I wanted to illustrate in as poignant a manner as possible. I wanted to objectify the endless pit of dark emotions that starts us thinking in an irrational manner. I depicted these emotions because I knew that I would not be the only one able to relate to the sculpture.
I enjoy creating thought-provoking art. Sculpture seems to come more easily to me than the other forms of visual art because of the hands-on nature of the medium. I'm a visual person and think out forms and compositions more thoroughly when I have something tangible in front of me. I don't plan on studying sculpture further while I am here but plan to study it informally at my leisure. My plan is to acquire a degree in graphic arts.
CAROL RITZ
Wudda Ya Lookin'At? . Peebles, Ohio
Yeah, I'm a floor tile. Ya gotta problem wi' dat? I just sit here in da hall of Precinct seven-fiddy-one. Sleep mosta da time, but den sumthin' happens and .... Yowza! ! Babe inna miniskirt. C'mere sweetie, give poppa sum love .... Ahhhhhhhhhh! No! Shit! Stilettos! Kee-rist, dose hurt.
Anyways, as I wuz sayin ', sumtimes stuff happens . Take last week. I'm sleepin' off a headache- got waxed dat day- when comes screamin' in two hookas annajohn. Betty I know on account she's in here a lot, but da blond chick, she wuz new. Da john wuz tryin' ta melt inta da floor, but we ain't lettin' his kind down here. I listened fer a while like always. Turns out da blond chick wuzn't no hooka. She wuz dajohn's wife. Lemme tell ya, da way she wuz dressed, she shou lda been one. Blue halta top so small her tits bout fell out anna skirt dat wuz so short ya could see da panties she wuzn't wearin'. Boots almost up ta her ass, wi' heels like icepicks. Wonda how she stayed up? Betty wuzsportin ' a new shina, and da john hadda bloody nose. Dey headed down da hall wi' Cap'n wutzisname followin' dem. Betcha DAT wuz a story he wuzn't sharin' wi' his wife. Woulda loved ta know how dat one turned out.
Oh, ya wanna hear bout da moida, huh. Figgas . Yer all da same. "B lood ! Guts! Moida! Tell us da frickin' story !" Keerist. Kids tryin' ta be big hot shot reportas. Ya wanna know da facts. Ignore da cops. Dere fulla shit. Wuz an inside job. Dey all knew it too. Wuz a cover-up. Protectin' dere own asses, is all it wuz.
ANONYMOUS
Lizard King
Computer Graphic, 8.5" x 11"
Portsmouth, Ohio
"R.A. FLOCKENCIER"
· · Brown New Boston, Ohio
I am not black; I am brown like Earth.
I am not black, Cause if I's black I'd be the color of the mid-afternoon skyline the day the sun and her stars fell from the heavens into vast leaves of solitude.
I am not black, Cause my mom is white, and I don't like rap, and I'm not ghetto. And I don't hate white people, and I don't hate the world, even though it stares out of the comer of its eye at my brown skin and whispers into the wind with a lisp, "He is black."
And maybe I'm not human, because I'm not black, white, chinese or the like. It's in the way I listen to The Bird, and The Wolf, and how I'm not down in the world of being down and out. And because I don't have a suspicious eye, I can't affirm my position in the world, and couldn't care less.
And it pays to be black. And it pays to be white. And I ain't black. And I ain't white. Cause I'm brown like Earth.
SAMANTHA JACKSON
Untitled Pencil on Paper, 25" x 30.25"
Greenup, Kentucky
But this one thing is by no means apparent to one who will not take the trouble to look.
-Thomas Merton
AARON GARRETT
Untitled
Computer Graphic, 8.5 x 11"
Portsmouth, Ohio
SUSAN REUTZAL
' Ole Ford
Watercolor on Canvas, 12" x 16"
Portsmouth , Ohio
CHARLES CL E VENGER
The Art of Seeing
Black an d Whi te P hotograph, 5" x 7"
Portsmou th , Ohio
In October 1997, I was privileged to be the instruct or for a photography class for the Elderhostel Program at Shawnee State University. On a field trip to John Simon's farm on Pond Creek/ Carey's Run Road, I gave the class an assignment: they were to practice the "Art of Seeing."
Each class participant walked around the farm while relying on his or her instincts and visual awareness to detect and dictate picture-taking opportunities.
All class members were shooting color film. The beautiful October weather set the surroundings abl aze with colorful subjects. Naturally, I thought, color would be the film of choice.
Meanwhile-to be different or perhaps to prove a point-my camera was loaded with black-and-white film. "Why?" you may ask, "We humans naturally see the world in full color and are accustomed to that."
I am convinced, however, after years of practice, that bl ack-andwhite photography forces the observer to take a closer look at objects. Our visual awareness is fine tuned to better see shape, form, texture, light, shadow, and detail. Try it; you'll see: Color film simply would not have had as strong an impact on this image.
BARB COSTAS
The Differences Between Us
. Portsmouth , Ohio
I kidnapped my next door neighbors ' daughter. I hate to say that I kidnapped Fran cie, but that's what I did. I was that nightmare every mother thinks about in the evening after her child is safely tucked into bed, but it wasn't just a nightmare because it happened. Anybody who took the time to get to know her would've wanted her. But they wouldn't have taken her. That's the difference between most people and me. I didn't hurt her; I just wanted her for my own. She was three. I was twenty-four.
Her family helped me move into my apartment after I left Arizona and found myself back in Pittsburgh like a dolphin with faulty sonar. Mitch, her father, carried my hutch up three flights with no help. Darlene helped me arrange my living room furniture , sparse as it was, and would bring Francie's baby monitor over while she was napping to help me paint, or to have a cup of tea, or to smoke cigarettes. (Mitch wouldn't let her smoke around Francie.) In the summer, I had no air conditioning. Mitch worked nights mostly. I had no one in my life except for Francie and Darlene. Dar would come over after Francie was safely asleep and sit on my fire escape and drink all my beer.
"Sweetheart ," she asked me one night, maybe a month after I moved in, "why is it you left Arizona? You never say nothing about yourself, and Mitch and I was wonderin'. We think of you as one of us now, you know. A family an' all."
"You know. Same reason people leave cities all the time. Hated the job. Whatever. I don't know. Do you want another beer?"
"Yeah."
She watched me walk carefully down the grated iron stairs and through the window into my living room. That window was my favorite thing about the apartment. It had these gauzy curtains that I had sewn myself from old scarves, and they would billow like sails at the quietest thought of wind
"Did you leave a man? Cause that's what I was thinkin'. I mean, you don't have to tell me nothin'. That's why I come to Pittsburgh, you know . I left North Carolina when I met Mitch . He was there for the summer working construction for my daddy. My momma hated him. Said he wasn't no good for me. She was wantin' me to be this debutante girl and all." She laughed after that. "Funny, huh? I mean look at me. Listen to me. So, I left. They don't even know about Francie. I can't say that I was really ready for all of that. Seemed real smart at the time ." She was yelling this to me as I looked for the beer.
"What do you mean , Dar? You' da made the best debutante this world had ever known." I was crawling back out.
She hooted . " Yeah."
We watched as cars sped by us and sirens sounded and drunk people wavered as they left a party in the building across the street. We were silent by the mouth but loud in our gesturing at flies and mosquitoes. It was funny because I really wanted to tell Darlene why I really left Arizona. Yeah, it was partly because I hated my job and the weather and the lack of seasons. Maybe that was what really drove me crazy. I had no way of gauging what was going to happen outside my little adobe house. For years I lived in the Midwest and knew exactly what to expect from a windy day or a cloudy day, but out there, I was a misplaced species. I was nothing, really.
I remember sitting outside at a little cafe and saying to my companion, "It's clouding up . We should maybe head inside before it starts to rain." He just laughed at me and told me that in Arizona, windy means windy and cloudy means cloudy. Nothing special, nothing tricky. Really no use for Doppler radar out there. And I just wanted to sink into the silty desert ground and wait it out. I wanted some water to wet my arid body.
But to tell Darlene that I finally had the nerve to leave because I had a breakdown seemed strange. And to really go into detail about the specifics was plain wrong. Tell her that I had been robbed of my own daughter? Tell her that every time I looked at Francie I thought about what I had almost had? She would never let me see her again. I knew that. I hardly knew her, and I think she was looking for an excuse to have a breakdown herself. Mitch was gone all the time, and she was raising Francie mostly on her own. I did a lot for her quickly, without really getting to know her, without thinking of the consequences of closeness.
"Miranda, can I wear my Zucchini and get a suntan on the roof?"
Francie was jumping on my couch. She called her watermelon-colored bikini her "zucchini." Mitch and Darlene had asked me to watch Francie while they left town for a long weekend to Lake Erie.
I scooped her up and dangled her upside down long enough to make her laugh. She had the biggest belly laugh, the whitest teeth. We sat down on the floor. She crawled up to my shoulder. "You know, kid, you are three and I'm a lot older than that. But you can sit up there all you want , you can perch like a bird on my shoulder. Because when you get older, like I am, it will be hard to find someone with shoulders wide and strong enough to support every ounce of your weight."
Nothing I said made any sense to her, but I kept going, my confession being the only thing that seemed real.
"I had a chance to have a little girl, you know. I think she would've been a lot like you . It's almost as if we're from the same tribe or something, with our red hair and freckles. I would've called her Winifred. I think people
would believe that you belonged to me. And whom would we have to fool, really? Teenagers wot'king in ice cream parlors Gas station attendants. A landlord...."
That was when I started packing to leave. I took such an odd assortment of things: pizza cutter, curling iron, bath towels, throw rug. If I had known then that Dar and Mitch weren't even expecting me to give Francie back to them, I would've given it more thought, maybe left them a note. I packed my car tightly. I secured Francie's car seat. She was coloring. I hated to take her away from it, but I suddenly felt rushed. I was afraid that I would run into Mitch and Darlene in the stairwell. How embarrassing. I'm skipping town with your child, I would have to explain.
She was asleep by the time we were out of the light of the city.
Driving is a bitch when I'm tired-even if I'm driving towards home, even if I'm driving the up and up of the rolling baby hills of the Appalachians of southern Ohio. I'm trying to think of things to pass the time, to take my mind off of everything that's waiting for me back in Pittsburgh. I know that there's no welcome home party, but there's also no police convoy. I don't want to have to wake up to that same cityscape every day and to learn to appreciate the grey winter instead of a bright one.
I try Neil Young in the tape deck, but not too loudly because Francie is sleeping stretched out in the back seat. We got a new car, one with more room for her and her growing willowy girlness. We always want music, good music to move to since we do that a lot. We get bored. We like to change our scenery.
I think about the road. Does it look as if it had been built around the landscape or was the landscape built around this road? Sometimes it looks like the trees and everything around the car were put there just to compl i ment the road, and I hate that. Those ugly plants and flowers seem to always be dying. It doesn't matter when they were planted, or that they were pl anted with the condemned hands of inmates from the state pen. On Saturdays I've noticed the inmates wearing orange safety vests so that drivers in hurries don't hit them.
As if it would be some great loss. That's what drivers in hurries think, I mean. What's good is springtime driving on this road. The shoulders are carpeted with true wildflowers of all sorts: Bachelor's Buttons, black-eyed Susans, d aisies, buttercupsp urple, yellow, red-all aimed at the sky. The fine for picking them is high, so I've never stopped. But I'm tempted now. I'd stop and lie in them, but there's probably a law agains t that too. I just drive on by at 55 because that's the limit and feel I'm really cruising-dazed, eyes full of blurred colors and dried mascara. The car behind me would disagree . I lean out of the window and shout, "Pass me already!" I'm in the slow lane, the look-at-the-flowers-and-I -am-ab le-to-break-for-deer lane. Do I remember the first time I drove this highway?
Do I remember the first time I drove down any black-faded-to-gray
asphalt highway ? I can't , but I know I must've been scared. I know that today I am driving home , and I am drained We've been in this tube of a car all day, taking our time and vi s iting Flying J's for Cokes and Corn Nuts and ammoniadrenched toilets . I'm tired . I'm nearing the exit that wants to take me home. It say s " Wheeling, West Virginia. " I'm now here near Indianapoli s, never even have been there, but I get the urge to go there instead of back to P ittsburgh. No one is expecting us here, there, or anywhere .
Francie wakes up. "Where are we, Miranda? "
"Heading back to Pi t tsburgh. I thought you might like to see your mom and dad on your birthday."
She sits and thinks, climbs to the front seat and turns the radio off. "You did? Why? If I wanted to see them, I would have told you. They haven 't really wanted to see me in years. You're my mom, Miranda . You ' re my dad."
"How about driving for a while. I'm tired."
I pull off the road and let her take the wheel. She has turned into a young me . I think about this as I watch her movements . She learned the truth when she was eleven about Dar and Mitch and what I had done. How I was supposed to be the babysitter but instead left with her and didn't stop driving for two straight days, thinking that my face would be on the news and that a trail of police cars would stretch behind me to the horizon
But Mitch and Dar never even filed a police report. Never called the paper. Never pleaded with me on national TV to bring Francie back. Once I even called the hotline for missing and exploited ch ildren. No th ing . I even doubt they still live in Pitts burgh . I tried once to call them right after I left and Francie was sick. I needed to know what she was all ergic to . Their phone had been di sconnected . So I left with their daughter to begin the life I didn't think I would ever have, and they didn't care that it was with their child. Who's the criminal? I don't think it's me.
"Not Pittsburgh , Miranda,: she said finally. "I can 't get the energy to care about Mitch and Darlene. You know?"
"Yeah. I do. So keep driving."
She speeds up . Driving with her is the best-she counts cows; she loves to pull over and breath in the outside air. I don't know where she will take me, but I will follow. She is my daughter. I am her mother.
SHANE BECHTEL
Razing Altruism
Pencil and Marker, 40" x 42"
Wurtland, Kentucky
Silhouette Winter/Spring
DARREN BAKER
Four
Portsmouth, Ohio
I grazed my fingers On your cheekbone. Pretending it was Your hair I was fixing. Only each strand was Perfect. Any way Perfect. Laying perfect, any way Laying, across and over Over and across Those eyes which Seem always to be Covered with too much Glaze. Always covered.
Flannel shirt and Turtleneck Under. Golden chain sleeps Under.
I often find Flaws in your clothing So I can touch them, Touch you.
Today, leaning over your shoulder, I wanted to lay my head Down. But my shoes were tied Too tightly and my glasses Were fogged Up.
DAVE RAWLINS
Little Green Men
Oil on canvas, 3' x 5'
Wheelersburg, Ohio -
To my mind , the tactile and intellectual functions employ ed in the execution of a painting are so throughly integrated that they are invisible . This does not mean that a painting cannot be trac ed to a specific idea . In the case of this painting, I rarely strayed from my original intention which was to lampoon certain beliefs that are rampant in our times. In truth , this painting began as a cartoon I drew (see below ), and it is my hope that the viewer shall recognize it as such .
Untitled Sketch, 8" x 5"
CHARLES M.WHITT
Found Poems
Beauty "Ridge, Kentucky
All the time I find these balloons draped over bushes at wood's edge, or hidden in tall meadow grass that I mow.
Balloons of all colors, always burst, and with a length of string holding an address card.
All that is left is the thick, round circle of the opening looking like a fish's mouth when all the body has fallen away.
I find these balloons, two or three a season; I never expect them; cannot imagine a message for me written in child's hand waiting to be read.
I take them, and put them into my pocket, thinking if they have been sent to me and found I shoul d treat them as explorers at a long, blind journey's end.
I bring these balloons and show them sure that everyone will see small fingers carefully releasing balloons into boundless skies.
These balloons get close to me. They suggest that something in nature is directed toward my sky.
The GALLAHER GROUP
Publication of this issue of the Silhouette has been made possible by the generous support of the Scioto County Area Foundation and the Maria and Bess Pixely Fund.
