by Jory Sherman
I wipe thick sweat from my forehead.
We wear the morning away, break for lunch under a shady oak. Duke gets his share of sandwich.
Late in the day, we are still hunting. A single jumps in front of us, peels off like a fighter plane. Dennis swings on the whirring bird. Parooms a shot. Behind a foot. The quail jerks, corrects its course. I clock him, swinging from behind, as he passes at the near end of my range. I blot him out in the sight picture, keep swinging on past him at the same speed, squeeze the trigger while the barrel is in motion. I dump him out of space with thwacks of shot that shear off a pinch of feathers. Caught him right at the tail end of the string, forty yards away, with number 7 chilled shot.
We picked up two more singles, got into another covey. Four birds dropped out of that one.
There was a whirring in my ears all the way home to Osage in Dennis' pickup. I thought back on the day.
I've got almost twenty years on Dennis. He's a fine shot, doesn't talk much. A good hunting partner in my book. He was polite enough not to ask me about a couple of episodes I had out there. He didn't say anything about the sweating, the times I drifted off, back to Lady Kay and the Colorado wheat fields, back to Korea on patrol, back to....
Hunting with my father. I had blocked that out. But it was there. I had sons, some not much younger than Dennis. I had never hunted with them, not pheasants, not quail, not dove, deer. I missed my father, and maybe I missed what I never had with my oldest sons, that rare companionship you find out in the field, under the sky, in the woods.
"You shot well today," Dennis said. "Real good."
"You, too." I almost called him "son."
"I missed that last one," he laughed. "Way behind him."
"A few inches."
"You got him. Clean and nice."
"He flew right into it. The Remington throws a good pattern at forty yards."
"Yah, it does."
I remembered something Dennis had told me earlier.
His father had never hunted with him as my father had hunted with me.
"Want to go again?" he asked when we pulled up at my place.
"Anytime, son. Anytime."
Nocturne
WELL, SHE TURNS over in sleep like something sleek and sweet, like a graceful seal rolling lazy in the ocean. And he looks at her in the dark of the room, sees the moon shed light on her face and arms as it streams through the windowpane, magnifies, streaks through her dark hair with pewter fingers. She is beautiful because the dim moonlight softens her, takes away her age, irons out the wrinkles in her face and sculpts her to a youthful figure in repose.
This is the time to look at her. This is the perfect moment to forget the bitter quarrels, the words laden with anger that coursed between them like arrows barbed and cutting, like sharp stones shot from a leather sling. This is the calm silence where good thoughts are born, where the bad past can be forgotten, where memory and history can be altered with little remorse.
Like this, he loved her. He could love her without any screen between them, any animosity. He could think of her as the child she once was, as the innocent, before the world and its ways corrupted her. It was a sweet, clean love and she was as beautiful in repose as a woman in a French Impressionist painting. She was forever, timeless, wonderful.
He wondered if she knew how much he loved her. He did not always say so. Not always at the right time, when it was needed most. Well, there was no way to tell her how much he loved her. It was too complicated. He could feel the love, as he felt it now, but to express such feelings was beyond his ability with words. Maybe this was the best way. Look at her asleep and let the love he felt wash over him, wash over her. Like healing waters, like balm.
He looked at her and it seemed he could feel her love him, too. He wanted her to love him. Like this, quietly, and without boundaries, without restrictions, amendments, qualifications. Maybe, he thought, such love could only exist at night, when the busy world was invisible, when only the two of them were alive. But that was only a small part of love, not even half. You had to love during the hard times, too. You had to love in the harsh light of day as well as in the soft spell of evening.
He wanted to awaken her, but he knew that if he did, it would all go away. Most of it, anyway. No, let her sleep. Let her be like this and tomorrow he would tell her how he had looked at her, and brushed a hand across her face, stroked her hair, nestled against her, secure in the darkness.
Tomorrow. It might never come. He might close his eyes and never awaken. He felt terribly mortal just then. She seemed so close, yet so far away. She was lost to him, lost in the ocean of sleep, unaware of his presence or his thoughts.
"I love you," he said softly into her ear. She did not stir and he wondered if the words could go through sleep, could penetrate the subconscious and work through the dream, become part of memory. "I love you," he said again, more loudly and she stirred, turned away from him.
Maybe she knows, he said to himself. Maybe she knows that I feel this way about her all the time.
He put an arm across her waist, closed his eyes.
He vowed to tell her about all this. Tomorrow, he would tell her that he had looked at her while she was sleeping and that he had felt a great love for her that had built up over the years. He would wait until she was wide awake and had had her coffee. That's when he would tell her how he had felt looking at her as he had.
He did not sleep for a long time because he kept trying to put all of it in words and none of the words said what he had felt. The words kept getting tangled and mixed up and he finally gave up.
"Goodnight, sweetheart," he said and those were the right words, finally.
"Goodnight," she replied, turning over, taking him into her arms. "I love you."
And there it was, the nocturne he could not put into words because it was too complicated. He opened his eyes and kissed her, but she was already back to sleep. Fast asleep, a smile on her face.
In Silent Wood
THERE WERE two woods for me when I was a boy. There was the playwood that bordered the 16-acre pasture near the house. That was where I built my secret fort, stored my wooden guns, my pine-cone hand grenades, my innertube rubber bullets. Across the road from the barn, the servant's quarters, the chicken coop, hog pens, and stables, there was the big wood with the tall pines, the chittering fox squirrels, the secretive wood duck nests, all the mysteries of big, empty forests. That wood was where the raccoon, the 'possum, the woodcock, the bobwhite quail dwelled.
That wood, too, was where the guinea hens made their nests, and though I tracked them many a day, I never found a single nest or egg. This wood was where I went to listen to the great silence, to block out the sounds of my small civilization across the road. We lived on Cross Lake then, near Shreveport, Louisiana, and had few, seldom-seen neighbors.
A black man lived in the woods. He did little work, but hunted and trapped for his subsistence. I saw him a few times, asked him his name once. He said it was Big Boy and that was what those who knew about him called him. But I stayed far away from his shack when I roamed the woods and I never saw him when I was hunting out there. He was big, and he was fearsome to a boy of eight whose imagination ran like the rushing waters of a millrace.
Those woods are gone now. The farm is gone, too. Gone from the earth, but not from mind.
I wonder now if my life course was not set back there in those southern boyhood woods, the wood of play and the wood of silence. I did not take up the gun and become a soldier. I chose the pen instead. And, here in the Ozarks, I found the wood of silence, the place where I can go to shed the impedimenta of civilization, the steel armor of ego, the sword of anger, the lance of resentment.
The feel of oak bark against the palm is oddly comforting at such silent, solitary times when I go into the woods. There, I sit on a fallen giant of a tree and listen to the strange ancient music of forests, away from the daily concerns of commerce and the bellowing blat of the business world.
In silent wood, the poetry returns, the memories of a childhood of islands among trees a good forty yards tall. I remembered, the other day in the woods, some lines from a poem Dylan Thomas wrote on his thirty-fifth birthday (he did not celebrate many more before his rich Welch singing voice was stilled in New York), when he heard "the bouncing hills Grow larked and greener at berry brown Fall and the dew larks sing Taller this thunderclap spring..."
I felt the lyrics move through me as they moved through him.
And, in silent Ozarks wood, my own child-owned woods came back to me in full bloom, green and golden with columns of sunlight pouring on the acorn-strewn earth. The cleared land rose up again in my mind, bigger than ever, and I remembered the secret ponds, the thrilling terror of a covey of bobwhite bursting from cover, the whispering wings of a timberdoodle climbing straight up in defiance of gravity and the laws of flight.
I remembered when I was "green and carefree, famous among the barns about the happy yard and singing as the farm was home. In the sun that is young once only, Time let me play and be Golden in the mercy of his means, And green and golden I was huntsman and herdsman, the calves sang to my horn, the foxes on the hills barked clear and cold, And the Sabbath rang slowly In the pebbles of the holy streams."
Like Dylan Thomas, I had my own Fern Hill and though it is gone like my childhood, it lives again in these Ozarks woods, springing forth like a seldom Brigadoon when the sun is high and I sit beneath a scaly-bark hickory, all alone, of an indeterminate age, a boy again, perhaps, or only a man who has not forgotten from whence comes all strength.
In secret wood I look up at the hills and I feel strong again and remember when I, too, was "young and easy under the apple boughs About the lilting house and happy as the grass was green..."
And though the woods are different, somehow they seem the same for both boy and man.
The Persistence of Memory
AT THE computer, dreams take shape.
Sometimes.
Away from the blessed solitude, only reality. Yet the writer must live in both worlds.
The trigger to dreams is the encounter, physical and mental, with people outside the dreams. This is not a womb here, in front of my computer, but it often feels as if being here might be a return to a more trouble-free existence. Especially in January, when the hunting seasons are over, the lakes too cold to fish, the ground so hard and frozen that even a walk is a femur-jarring experience.
We settled here in Branson after wandering away from the Ozarks for two and a half years. We saw the great country, the enormous, powerful, haunting, magnificent West once again, the desolation and the awesome emptiness, the grandeur of the mesmerizing landscape, with its ghosts, its shifting colors, its mystical spells, its raging sunsets and endless skies.
We began our next phase of Ozarks solitaire in a humble dwelling that we planned to use only for a base while we continued to travel. We wanted to get back to the land we left, to work in peace and solitude, to find again the roots we had tendriled through the Arkansas earth. Just over the border, in Missouri, it seemed an ideal place to rest and take stock.
The old farm we owned in Arkansas was now inhabited by a younger couple and their children, good people who have inherited much that we reluctantly left behind.
I look at the muzzle loading rifles in the gunrack behind my desk, at the burlap calendar on the wall, the poster of a song on the door, a poem about the breaking of morning, a reminder of the first morning and all the mornings after, and begin to wind up my long day. I am grateful for this room, this mobile home in Lake Taneycomo Woods, my family.
It has been a day of scrambling and disorganized effort. I wonder if there is anything significant about it. Probably not. I enjoyed it though, as I enjoy every day.
The sunset tonight was spectacular. Seldom has this Ozarks sky been so red. The horizon was a broad smear of red ocher beyond Table Rock Lake.
A reporter came over from the local newspaper this afternoon to interview me about my first Ozarks book. We talked about a lot of things, but not about the book. He wanted to pin me down to something preconceived in his mind. I had only a mild objections, since it is easy to pin down a writer.
Writers are never seen at work. People see us only when we appear idle. I say "appear" because, like writing itself, this is an illusion. The mind is never idle. The writer's mind is never very far away from the work. So, you see the reporter, talk to him. He is liable to end up in a book, even if only superficially. He could wind up as a reporter in 1850 or 1866 or at the turn of the century. You can talk to a man in a saloon and he is transformed, one day, into a fictitious character. We writers gobble up people like grave robbers in a cemetery of stereotypes.
Some people are uncomfortable around writers. I can understand why. We have a way of looking beyond conversational patter and digging into a person. We connect people up to other experiences, other personages in other times. We live in the present and write in the past tense. It's always past tense, even if we write of the future. An idea is born, grows old before our very eyes.
The hum of my computer is comforting. The words appear on the screen in front of me as if they were scrolled there magically. It is quiet in the house. The books that surround me are oddly reassuring. Just to gaze at them brings a solace beyond explication. Someone has been there before, where you are going. I can see into their pages and recall the words that sing there, seemingly forever. At least the words are emblazoned there for as long as I will be around.
I recall the sunset and the sunrise.
Both were beautiful. And part of my habit, my simple creed never to miss either during your brief life on earth. They are just as precious as each breath taken in each day. They are things to recall during times of distress or trouble.
Recollection is a gift. A friend of mine, Jack Agins, was a doctor in Hollywood. He was a specialist in geriatrics. He once asked my advice about a book he wanted to write about elderly people. I did not have much advice since I was a young man in my thirties then. My mother loved elderly people and babies. I told him about her and he asked some technical questions about a book's organization and the writer's discipline. I told him how I constructed a book and stuck to it, working easily in harness, using my subconscious to find answers to plot puzzles and scene depictions.
Than I asked Jack what was the most terrible thing that an elderly person faced.
His answer was not what I expected. It was not loneliness, nor neglect, nor the fear and sadness of approaching death. Rather, the most crushing blow to an elderly person is the loss of memory. The horror of old age was being unable to remember the good times, the old times. The times.
I have thought of Jack's pronouncement a lot since then. Jack was right. Losing one's memory would be like erasing the chapters stored in the computer, like seeing all the pages of all the books in my room suddenly go blank.
I think I write, perhaps, because I want to leave a record of some days spent here on this good earth. Not out of ego or because my life is so special; it is not. But, because the best times are those shared with another, with someone you love, someone you do not know. With someone you want to know, even though you never will. And, too, I want to remember something before I forget it, forever.
It has been said that a writer must keep a diary or notebooks. There have been times when I felt this was the thing to do. But the practice never caught on with me. There is something secretive about a diary. My notebooks end up cobwebby, damp, soaked with rain, mildewed. I abandoned the practice when I realized that these private notations were not shared. They were cold, subjective, ego-stroking glyphs of no value to me or anyone else.
Instead, I write a lot of letters. These are my notes, my diary. They are keys to my memory. Even if I never see them again, they have gone out to someone, have told them about the day, the night, the pain, the good times, and the bad.
Here, in the Ozarks, there is so much that is memorable. There is so much to see every day, tha
t if you don't write it down, it will slip through your fingers like the tailfeathers of a bird caught on the run.
People ask why I do not write a history of the Ozarks. I am not a historian. I do not know the history of these hills and these people. I can only record my own history. And, the only true history anyone has a record of today or will have tomorrow is what people remember, speak about, or sing, or put to paper.
No, I do not write history or make it. All I do is write down my impressions of what I see, hear and feel.
I don't know if anyone will read what I have written here some 50 years or a 100 years from now. But, someone might. If the paper lasts.
I would like to find a diary in an old house that mentioned how life was a hundred years ago here in the Ozarks. I would like to read about land I've walked on in this century that has changed over the years so that it only slightly resembles the land seen by those who were here before us.
So, even though I no longer keep a diary, I am grateful to those who have. Because a diary shared is no longer a private, secretive thing, but a kind of history, personal as blood, about everyday moments that gradually fade from memory.
And the reporter who wrote down a note or two and went away had his opinions of me before he even met me. The article was already written in his mind when he knocked on my door. He could not capture me. Not his fault. No one could. Even I could not. As a writer I wear so many masks. I am so many people.
You cannot capture anyone with a camera or with words. You cannot paint anyone as they really are. You can only struggle for essences, impressions, points of reference, create outlines, notes, sketches.
Feelings.
Memory.
Everything written down is post ipso facto. After the fact. Done. Gone. What we record has already happened, is past tense. History.
Now, at the end of a day, I look around my room and realize that this is the best place to be right now. Here is where I can see the sunrise, here is where I can remember the sunset. Here is where the history is recorded with futile, grasping hands in language that is barely adequate to express the wonder of existence.