by Jory Sherman
I was awed then and I am still awed when I think about total nothingness, a noneness that is almost incomprehensible.
The mist hangs here, strays, lingers, hovers, drifts, for a long time. The light, the Foxfire light, builds, explodes, permeates, invades the delicate shadow-swirl of these steam clouds. It is like being alive at the dawn of creation. It is like being present during the time of the inexpressible Void and seeing nothings take shape. First, perhaps, a fine mist, and then a mass, pulsing with heat, with energy. Or maybe only a thick soup, sometime after the beginning of things, flooding through nothingness and breaking up into fiery chunks that gradually cooled as that mysterious force, gravity, held the newly created solids in perfect check and balance.
I know that none of this was simple. Yet, we have a clue or two to guide us in our search for how matter was created, is created. Not specifically, as the King James translation of the Bible says, from the Word, but from the thought. The big thought. The beginning of everything is thought. A mind conceiving something from nothing. That is simple enough, but not accurate enough. The thought must have energy. That energy is belief. To believe a thing will occur, will be created, and to believe that such a thing is already created, is the secret to all creation. These stray thoughts of mine, as I stroll through a small world of mist and cloud, bring these points home to me.
Yet, complex as my world is, as simple as it appears, I realize that its existence is beyond my comprehension. But it was within someone's comprehension. Francis Crick, the Nobel Prize winner who wrote Life Itself, Its Origin and Nature, in trying to explain the barely fathomable world of DNA and RNA, wrote this: "An honest man, armed with all the knowledge available to us now, could only state that in some sense, the origin of life appears at the moment to be almost a miracle, so many are the conditions which would have had to have been satisfied to get it going."
What is life and why is life? These are questions that echo in my mind as I walk through the creation of morning. And I do not take this morning for granted. I am present at its creation after all, and there must be something to learn here. Yet, it is probably arrogant of me to assume so much from such scanty evidence as clouds, mist and a strange, seldom seen light.
I do not want to make too much out of these small moments. They are normal, I suppose, for this time of year and for this place. But, somewhere inside me is a child who remembers his first primitive thoughts, his first fears, his first inklings that once there was nothing and now there is everything. Will someone come along and take it all away? That was the childhood fear. If there was nothing once, there could be nothing again.
Someone has described me as an immigrant to the Ozarks. I suppose that is technically so. Yet I have never felt like an immigrant. Not that there is any adverse connotation to the term. It is true that I was not born to these parts and I am a relative stranger. But, when I came here, I did not feel that I was an intruder nor an outlander. Rather, I felt that I was coming back home.
This is a complex feeling, but I guess I mean that this was the place I had always wanted to be, without actually knowing where it was. I knew that such a place must exist, but I had never been there.
I am here now. I no longer feel like an outsider. Nor an immigrant. Yet, this morning, in Foxfire mist, with the light swirling through gauzeclouds of an uncertain origin, I realize that I am still coming into the Ozarks, into this good earth, to find something that I dreamed of as a child. A place where I could see creation happen; where I could search through what memory I was given to look for my beginnings. To look for a Father. A Great Spirit.
There will be light today and the mists will drift away. At the end of the road, I turn back toward home. Certain trees I had not seen earlier will be visible now. Some will be gaunt and leafless. The cedars will give off their musty scents, their eerie green-black glow. I will look again at the wedges of deer tracks and remember a clay tablet in a museum that had an important message left behind for us to decipher.
As the mist rises, I will wonder where it is going, why it was here. And I will guess at where it came from. Don't talk to me about convection and air currents. Tell me about faeries and gossamer-winged creatures that seek out the eerie lights that surge through these hills on magical mornings and lurk in the shadows on certain dusks when the moon is hidden behind dark clouds and the woods turn invisible as if swallowing the earth, as if returning it to the void from whence it came.
Talk to me about things that make sense for a romantic who immigrated to these Ozark hills to find the answers to all those boyhood questions that seemed to have no earthly source.
Tell me what you see in these mists, if you dare, and tell me the true meaning of creation and the peculiar light that natives call "foxfire."
The Creek at Sunsettle
THIS IS A place of guitars.
A place of rhymes and rhythms. Plucked strings that linger on the mind like sonic cobwebs. An eight-legged spider in the middle, swaying to the breeze-music, waiting for prey to hit the strands. The glue is there, a suckling substance attuned to hairy feet, glazed sleek for the final dancing, primed by the arachnid's saliva, shivering silver in the wind.
An attic.
A place in a house, murky with shadows, creaking with the ancient tempos of loss and capture. A place of secrets and delicate chords in a minor key.
Just you do not whimper now. Do not cry. Hold yourself inside yourself else breath leave you like a sigh and you here in this webbed gray cell of a room where no one can hear you scream or weep.
In the attic, I search for a special carton. A box of old home movies. I breathe in dust, listen to the sing-creak of the boards under my footfall. As I move through the dim light there is the wheeze-sound of a dead accordion or my own lungs struggling to separate molecules of oxygen from the motes of stirred-up dust cluttering the thick fetid air.
The box is there, as I remembered it. Quilted with a layer of fine grit deposited there over the years.
I brush off a patina of sandy particles, pry through the masking tape to open the carton. It is like peeling back skin, dead skin.
The film cans clatter as I rattle the box with trembling hands.
My sneeze is sudden, spontaneous. A surprise. The air boils with my own mist.
There, the box splits open at the seam held in bondage by the tape. There are four small cans, each holding 100 foot spools of 8 millimeter film.
My hands are trembling. I read the labels on the outside of the film cans. There is only one that I must see, and it is the last of the four.
I take the film cans over to the opening in the floor of the attic. I descend the ladder, into the empty house. The late afternoon sun is pulling shadows across the meadow, pulling oak shadows and the shadows of the box elders my grandfather planted fifty years before when I was but a boy of fourteen.
The projector sat in the center of the livingroom. I pulled the white drapes, shutting off the world of meadow and shadows. The room darkened. I threaded the film through the sprockets in the projector. I flipped the switch. Shadows flickered on the white drapes. The images were wrinkled, but I saw them all, my parents, my grandparents, my brother and my two sisters. My wife and my daughter appeared, laughing and smiling. My daughter blew out the candles on her cake. My wife swam in the creek. She looked like Esther Williams in her one-piece bathing suit. The photolamp flickered and I saw myself, standing next to one of the box elders, pretending to hold it up as my wife tilted the movie camera.
I saw it then, what I had been looking for--at the very end of the film. The sun daubing the creek with colors, the colors of Degas and the shimmering lights of Cezanne, the hues of Monet and the violent swirls of Van Gogh, the dark shades of Vermeer, the wild and gaudy flames of Toulouse Lautrec. The creek burned with the colors of sunset and I could almost hear its waters swirling around the deep bend at the Blue Hole.
The projector fluttered as the film ran out and flapped on the take-up spool.
I hear the sound
of a car coming up the drive. The front door opens and there is my wife and daughter, my daughter's son, Billy.
Diane pulls open the drapes, drenching the room in fading sunlight. The projector disappears, but I sense that it is still there. I feel caught between two worlds and I am confused. I feel as if I'm floating in water, suspended in time like a foetus in a jar of preservative.
"Mom, better check on Dad," she says to Willa, and my wife calls my name.
"Les, we're home."
I follow my wife into our bedroom and she sees me there, lying still and peaceful on the coverlet, my hands folded across my stomach. She chokes up, sobs. My daughter rushes in. Billy comes after her.
Willa touches the cheek of me on the bed. She picks up my hand in hers and squeezes it. Tears run down her cheeks. I open my mouth to speak, but I have no voice.
Someone touches my shoulder.
"It is time," a voice says.
"I don't want to go," I say and my voice is soft, no more than a whisper. It sounds like someone blowing out a candle.
I am at the creek. We used to go down there at sunset, my father and I, and just watch the way the colors changed in the swirling waters. I used to beg him to go and see the creek at sunsettle, for that's what I called it. I didn't say sunset, for it didn't seem a right enough word. The sun was settling behind the Ozarks hills for the night and that was how I always saw it just before it disappeared from view, all aflame and beautiful at that time of day.
There was on old boat there, and a man beckoned to me.
"We must cross the river," he says.
"This is only a creek. Osage Creek."
"It's all the same. The Styx. The River Jordan. It's the big river. I'm taking you across."
"Where are we going?" I ask, and I realize that time is flowing in both directions for me. One moment I am in the past, and the next I am in the present.
"To your future," he says, and when he has said it, I know it is right. I climb into the boat and we move across the bend in the creek, right over the Blue Hole. I hear the scrambled voices of children and my wife calling my name.
Then, I see the creek at sunsettle from the other side, from a place I have never been. It widens out like a vast river and I cannot see to the other side. It looks peaceful, but I can sense the muscular undercurrents, the magic and light in its eddying sworls.
I hear my father's voice and my grandfather's and my brother's and my two sisters' voices and they sound like singing, sound like people singing my new name.
This, too, is a place of guitars.
A place of secrets and delicate chords played in a minor key.
I sense someone in my house thinking of me, prowling through the attic.
I hear sounds that crackle and rasp before they fade inside the swell of music.
For a moment, I see back into my livingroom. I hear whispers. I see a silver cobweb drift out through an open window, disappear in shadows.
The projector stops flapping as someone flips off the switch and, in the darkness, there is just the tiniest point of light.
Ozarks Critters
WATCH OUT for those little brown creatures. All of the serious biting of legs and arms, elbows, behind the ears and in unreachable places, is done by coffee-colored, amber, mauve, or tan insects. Some are deadly, some are just down-right irritating.
There is the Brown Recluse spider, for instance. They say this little eight-legged critter is even more toxic than the dreaded Black Widow. I don't know. I've seen a couple of them, and they look deadly enough. I'm glad they're reclusive.
Then, there are the seed ticks, and the pre-seed ticks. Not long ago, my son Forrest, out here from California, made the mistake of walking through the high grass in the field that borders our front yard. Later, we were working on the computer in the basement when he shrieked and crossed one leg, jerked his trousers up and started scratching and digging into his bare flesh. "What is this?" he screeched, holding up one finger to which was attached a minute, teensy, wriggly thing. The thing was brownish. It looked like a brown chigger.
"Seed ticks," I said, "but these look almost embryonic."
"How do you get them off?" he pleaded.
"Wash them off, use Scotch tape..." I never finished my sentence. Forrest was off like a pair of bridegroom pants on wedding night. I didn't see him for several hours, but heard the upstairs shower running like Niagara's great falls in April.
The next day, Forrest bought a mysterious sack of goods from the Quik Mart and later, he reeked of raw alcohol and insecticide.
"Those were just babies," I told him. "They were just beginning to teeth. Wait'll later, when they congregate in little clumps on bushes. You walk through the woods and hit one of those bushes, and whop! You look down at your pants and you see a brown stain. It looks like flocking. But, then, it starts to move and if you don't get out of those pants real quick, you've got decimation of the leg bone."
"What?" he growled, and I could see the beginnings of paranoia in the depths of his eyes.
"They're all teeth, then," I told him. "They're looking for a host on which to gorge. They seem to be of one mind, a single entity, but there must be thousands of them all banded together on a bush, ready to pounce on the first host who passes. Curious. All teeth, Forrest."
He left the Ozarks some days later, smelling like disinfectant, like the emergency room in a hospital.
The other night, while I was asleep, Charlotte spotted a scorpion in the hallway. She grabbed a piece of paper, stooped down, tried to smash the creature against the wall. It leaped free, arched its tail and stung her on the index finger, close to the nail.
The pain was ferocious. Then, as she recalled for me the next morning, she dashed into the livingroom where Marc and his friend, Michael Fisher were watching television and announced in hysterical tones that she had been bitten by a scorpion. Marc's face drained of blood and he asked her if she wanted to go to the hospital.
"Get the encyclopedia!" Charlotte screamed.
"The encyclopedia?"
"Look up 'Scorpion!' Quick!"
Then, Charlotte frantically searched the book shelves for the Handy Home Medical Guide. Marc found the item about scorpions and Charlotte found the medical book. She thought she was going to die. The pain was excruciating. The next morning, our dining room was littered with open books. All turned to items about scorpions. See Spider Bites, one book said, and I looked up Spider Bites, the symptoms, treatments thereof, and chances for survival.
"It's the Arizona ones that are deadly," Marc told us.
"Is it? Are they?" Charlotte's voice quavered and I saw that she was hanging onto the very edge of an hysterical fit, perhaps madness.
"I thought these were Arizona scorpions," I said reassuringly. "Migrated here. Tourists, you know."
A dark look from my wife. My smile faded, cracked.
"It was a big one," she said, tentatively.
"I killed one in the garage the other day," I told her.
"Why didn't you tell me?" she said.
"I'm telling you now. Maybe you should clean out the hallway. They're very shy, you know."
Well, she didn't die, but her finger hurt for several days. My theory is that she was lucky. She got stung on an extremity, far from the heart, and the fingernail probably saved her from getting a full dose of venom. She didn't kill the scorpion, so it's still around here, lurking, like the Brown Recluse, or the flocked seed ticks, in some dark corner, waiting to strike.
Listen, I turn on the lights when I get up in the morning and make a careful scan of the floor. I shake out my shoes and boots and make a lot of noise when I walk into the kitchen to turn on the coffee.
I certainly don't want to end up a paranoid basket case like some members of this family.
The Summer People
JUNE GENTLES the land with sun. The ridge between the old Forsyth ferry and Kirbyville greens itself like some farmer's field, the oaks and cedars blazing emerald from dawn to dusk. The valleys b
eyond the old freight road seem like a fairyland in morning, the hills rising like islands, the far ones bathed in a gossamer mist like the smudged underpainting of an artist's canvas.
The morning lake is still, a sheet of polished steel snaking to a point miles away, where it disappears like the ghost of the river it once was. A few moments ago, my dawn whippoorwill moved close to the open bedroom window, filling my room with his piercing, high-pitched cries. He sounds like a maddened flutist stuck on the same notes, and he sounds, too, like a friend who just happens to sing in a foreign language. At my neighbor's, across the hollow, a rooster crows.
The whippoorwill goes silent suddenly, as if the cock's crow signaled a fatal sunrise. I have never seen this bird whose cry is so loud for a few brief moments, but only his shape, silhouetted among the leaves of an oak tree. He is only a shadow to me, without form, isolated, the source mysteriously hidden somehow. He comes when the world goes to sleep, and he does not leave until the woods awaken.
A gray squirrel chitters at my shape in the window, furling and unfurling his tail like a quilled flag. He is young, bold, and I wonder if he has seen the whippoorwill or only a shadow streaming across his tree branch before it disappears in the silence of the deep woods. I wonder where the whippoorwill goes.
On Lake Taneycomo, as the sun rises, the first boats pull away from the shore, chug up toward Table Rock Dam through low fog. The men who work the docks on Bull Shoals are busy, the fishermen still sleepy-eyed, impatient to head for the sunken trees where the crappie lurk, or the sandstone banks, where the bass hide. Table Rock Lake, too, is teeming with fisherfolk who want to beat the sun to their favorite spots. A pair of farmboys, barefooted and cutoffed, trip to the pond after catfish, lugging a can of squirming nightcrawlers, carrying poles with hook and line, clutching stringers and cans of pop.
Branson, Hollister, Forsyth, the villages near where we live, and all those along the tourist roads, from Kimberling City to Eureka Springs, like movie sets being prepared for a day's shooting, open up, as if someone was pulling open the giant doors of a sound stage. The whisper of brooms and the rattle of door locks crackle down the streets; the dusters and sweepers and Windexers urgently spiffing up their shops for the summer people of Ozarks Mountain country.