Into Night

The sun set ablaze the fog and dust that settled above the brown cornfields as it mingled with the crisp air in the autumn sky.
We were bathed in the odors of wood smoke and harvest and surrounded by the golden light of September.
The cool winds of the day buffeted us as we were bounced around in the back of the old green truck, rambling and grumbling down the tar coated gravel roads.
Earlier we had fought for ownership of the trucks wheel well housings; we all knew that they afforded the best view and offered the bed rail to hold on to. The smaller of us normally found ourselves sitting with our backs to the cab where the fine particles of dirt, churned by the wind, would sting our faces.

The feeling of defeat was not lasting.

As the glowing colors of evening turned to a dark starry night, the temperature dropped and bastions of fog silently assembled from field to road in efforts to reclaim their taken ground.
Danny and Carrie held positions of windswept sentry and we younger and smaller huddled for warmth behind them, covering our cold, aching ears.
Hurtling into the night.

You don’t always have the opportunity to choose the souls that journey with you through this life.
There is no guarantee of the person’s quality, or that all of you will endure and arrive at the same end.

We are all fragments of the same stone; separated, sorted, and faceted. Each, ground and polished over time to different degrees. Tumbling like gems on dark velvet, turning and resting, for a time, as light and color are captured and reflected.

Each one of us is comprised of what the other is missing; possessing for the other a memory of what we once were and the knowledge of what we can be; searching for purchase and acceptance, like so many keys for so many locks.

Where are you?

What do you need from me?

I will reach for you,

as we pass in the night.

Coyote

10 April 2008, 21:32
The team of coyotes padded South off of the blacktop road and down into the wet grass of the ditch bottom.
Pausing, they glanced over their shoulders, through the drizzle and into the dark of where they came.
The wet shadows of the night covered them as they continued on their fog entrenched path. Leaving only silence and an image seared upon the mind and soul.

Every one has a path to tread through this life; mine was marked before I was born.

My father had a dream years before my birth. The dream was filled with dark and dread. From the dark, an image of a boy formed and was given the name Lamech. A second boy appeared from the gloom and was named Amalek. I am the second boy born to may father after that dream and am named Amalek

"The Lord will have war with Amalek from generation to generation."

At an early age I found this scripture while sitting on a pew in the local Pentecostal cult that we were members of.
I knew about the dream and had the name so I took what was written to heart and wished I hadn't been born.

Amalek: Warlike; Dweller in the valley.

I was immersed in that religion for eighteen years. Spiritually I tried to reconcile my dark birth by repenting, speaking in tongues, praying, memorizing my bible, and separating myself from the things of this world. I tried to be "In the world, but not of the world." as the pastor said I should be.
But, I still never measured up to all of the 'saints' around me. I knew I could never be as close to God as all of the white haired elders who spoke in the tongues of angels.
After all, I was born to be rubbed out and never brought to mind again by the chosen people of God.
During these years my brothers and sisters fell around me. But, I survived, waiting for God to fall upon me with 'all, consuming fire.'

When my father was dying he recounted the dream and the dread that it was filled with. He was impressed with the accuracy of the dream; out of the dark, dread, and death that had stalked his family he had been given two sons that would continue. Two healthy sons who don't carry the mutated gene that killed his other children.

My father left this world and with him went many of the difficult life situations that had kept my heart and mind alive. The era of emergency, critical decisions, camaraderie, and adrenalin was over. My soul was empty; I was a cavernous well-shaft that had been propped and braced with rotting timbers and fissured stone. My heart was a vacuum and as it strained to pull the ceiling down I began to follow a dark trail of self destruction. I sought the occupation of a warrior. I chose to meet God on my terms.


It is insanity, but so often necessary to close the doors on so many memories; good and bad are sickly laced with an ache that radiates out of my skin. It is a fragmented life, a partial being, an incomplete person that needs to clip out, tear off, and utterly remove portions of his life to take further steps to continue a path in life.
I have robbed other people in my life by being so incomplete….
Who reached into my soul and hollowed me, who scraped the insides of me and left the cavernous well of empty…….
Did a God do this? "Ask anything of Me, I will give it….." What you want, I will give, I will make it so…..Ask anything of me, I will grant it….." "….. Guide my feet, take me, Guide my feet……"

I chose the hard ways, the tough and the bitter. I volunteered for the arduous, the dark, the wet, and the dirty. I pressed the veil that separates this world from the next.
I pressured that old God to meet me, but he pushed back and obscured my fields of fire.
I cursed him and sharpened my knives.
I authored my operation order and he let me run my reconnaissance behind enemy lines.
I prepared the field of battle and he sowed it with poppy's.
I was born again, hard. Hardened by my enemy.

I chose a path that in my mind was far different from the one I had been taught to walk, far removed from the way that I was raised.

I searched for destruction, but found healing.

My years as a soldier repaired my heart and mind. I educated and strengthened myself, I buried the parts of me that were dead, and I gained innumerable brothers in arms.

I have met my God and have accepted my name.
I have accepted who I am and what I was formed to be.

Looking over the years, I can see where I have been and I can see how seamlessly my path had been directed.
I have become what I was born to be; I am a living promise to a father, a human article of war, and I have walked in the valley, in the shadows of death.

My path continues. The waters are sweet, the grass is plentiful, and I fear no evil.

Resonance

I am absolutely unable to deny that there is a substance that fills the voids in this world with unseen tethers.

An element, ancient, that continues to reach beyond years, and time.

Vibrations that permeate mass, the peripheral of sight, and the infiniteness of silence.

Without question, I am not the first to witness the inescapable artifices of this quantity.

This essence has been filtered and manipulated into the God’s of primitive men and worshipped for what it once was.
I cannot relinquish the understanding that it is much, much more than saviors, prophets, saints, and angels.

It reaches through me to draw and connect the particles of this existence.
Yearning for the good in things, the good as embers that seem to have been cast from the fire.

It resonates, whispers, pushes to pull, shines, and guides.

I am bound to it, and I am as much a part of it as I am the earth, the sky, the stars, and the void that holds them.

It is undeniable.

It is.

Currency

For a price, people have the ability to live long beyond the time that they shed their mortal coil.

The only legal tender accepted is influence.

I have been fortunate to live a life that has been filled with people of character who poured out this currency like water on open ground.

They were tinted with the hardships of their lives, not the typical issues of bills and schedules, but the kind of experiences that leave calluses on the heart. The Great War and Depression, blood soaked feet on foreign soil, abuse, death, and scraping a meager living out of barren dirt had tempered them; they were wise souls who wanted joy and found it only in small increments.

For years I handled my memories of them like one would photographs taken towards the sun; I accepted them as significant, but poorly manipulated, and stuffed them into the bottom of a box.

As I age I find myself pulling them from their slumber. I look through the grainy surface, tattered corners, and haze to remember and search for what was captured in time and why. Some are still obscured and difficult to look at, but many are like Saturday morning sunshine that beams through a large window, illuminates the dust in the air, and warms the floor.

When we moved to Martinsville we lived in an old bungalow behind Waltz's Liquor Store on Josephine Street. My dad purchased the home which was built by the father of our neighbor, Mr. Cooper. The house was entirely too small for a family of seven. Danny, Joe, and Lameck slept in the front bedroom. My oldest sister Carrie and I slept in a small room off of the original dinning room. Dad and Mom slept in the original living room. Entertainment was in the original dinning room and meals were held around a metal table in the tiny kitchen that was illuminated by the blazing glow of a single light bulb. The searing light was occasionally extinguished by an errant drop of rain water from the leak above.

The Coopers lived next to us and Mr. Cooper built the stone house that they lived in. Geodes (called Nigger Heads in the local dialect), wind chimes, pieces of foundry glass, and empty ham cans lined the window sills and side walks. A ‘glow in the dark’ werewolf poster hung above a freezer in their galley kitchen hall and dogs playing poker in a frame above their fireplace kept them company. Their home wasn't built with indoor rest room facilities and every morning you could see them, across the fence, making their way to the bath house for their morning duties.

The Coopers were a weathered old couple. Mr. Cooper (Luther) was a giant of a man who wore bib overalls, white T-shirts, worn work boots, and a graying, burr haircut. He had few remaining teeth and his lips that were always full of tobacco seldom parted but to mumble, spit, or roar "Bears Ass!" which was the expression that he used to begin or end conversations. He also shared this phrase with the larger world on a concrete plaque that was mortared into the top of his chimney.

Luther employed himself with his own concrete business making blocks, benches, bird baths, and the occasional grave stone. Many times he rescued me when my foot was trapped in the piles of block I was told not to climb. "Agh, Bears Ass!"

Mr. Cooper gave me my first taste of beer. He kept his small, brown bottles of Pabst in a crate on his front porch next to used ham cans filled with water for his large brindled dog named Brinson. "Mr. Cooper, what are you drinking?" "Beer. You want some?" "Sure!"

On my birthdays Mr. Cooper would pull big silver dollars from the chest pockets of his overalls and give me one for a gift. The weight of those thick coins in my small hands was empowering.

Mrs. Cooper (Lola) was short, stout, and spunky. She wore polyester slacks, sleeveless plaid shirts, curly unkempt hair, and black, horn rimmed glasses that were never in their correct place on the bridge of her too small nose. Her hands were scarred, callused, and always felt warm on the back of my neck or on my hands when she held them. She spoke with a high pitched nasally voice that was always broken with plenty of laughter. Lola mowed the yard and kept many flowers in her shade covered yard.

Next to the liquor store across the street she also raised a large garden every year. "Drunkards" urinating in her garden were a constant problem for her and she chastised them often. After buying beer for their trips home the "Drunkards" would step into the alley next to Waltz's and relieve themselves on her garden. The issues of errant urination ended one summer night with a loud blast and lots of screaming. Lola had loaded a shotgun with rock salt and emptied it into an unfortunate urinator. The sheriff arrived on the scene and simply told Mrs. cooper "You can't be shootin' people Mrs. Cooper."

We eventually moved from the home on Josephine Street and years later I was told that Luther had been moved into a nursing home. When I received the news I took my fiancé to meet Mrs. Cooper and to my great sadness Lola could not tie a memory to my face or my memories and apologized for the matter.

The Coopers and their shade covered stone house are no longer on Josephine street. Waltz's liquor store is named after the new owner, and the bungalow's wood siding that my father restored is covered in vinyl, but, the people, their words, their images, and my experiences with them glimmer and shine in the recesses of my heart. I believe those hardened souls managed in some way to polish me as well. I am thankful that they honored me by entrusting their memory to me.

They, in a great way, influenced me.

I will continue to write their receipts.

They will continue to live on.