Harmonia

1.
Winston got separated from his hunting buddies.  It happened this way. The deer stand was a canvas booth atop an aluminum scaffolding such as might support a lifeguard’s chair on a beach.  Indian summer lingered over the fields and green hillsides and it was hot in the stand, dull as well, dappled deer sleeping, Winston supposed, somewhere in the thickets that the hunters overlooked.  Winston finished his Pabst Blue Ribbon and said that he had to take a leak and, leaving his gun in the stand, climbed down the ladder to the field.  The deer stand surveyed a corn field where brown stalks were crushed flat by the harvesting equipment and, then, the dense edge of woods growing on the hillside that was too steep to till.  The trees were luminous, red and yellow and caramel brown leaves drizzling down, the hillside noisy with insects buzzing and humming in the drowsy heat.  A persistent yellowish haze hung over the ridges as well as the meadows and pastures in the valley where the county road snaked along a twisting stream, cutting back and forth over the peat-colored water on narrow one-lane bridges.  At the head of the valley, a little village was gathered up around an intersection where an old church reared its steeple like a brick exclamation point over the terrain.

Winston looked up and down the valley and, then, said that he would go into the woods a quarter mile from the deer stand and beat the bushes to drive the animals forward and within range of the guns.  Winston’s buddies were skeptical.  They said that it was dangerous.  “We’ll just probably end up shooting you,” one of his friends said.  Sometimes, the woods snapped with remote rifle shots.  At quarter-mile intervals, pick-up trucks were parked on the shoulder of the county road.  Winston tapped at his bright orange vest, gave his buddies a thumb’s up and, then, walked uphill to the tree-line, following the irregular and shadowy threshold of the forest for six-hundred yards before sliding sideways into the woods, slipping between two blisters of raw red sumac.

The woods were dense and tangled with thickets and nets of vine hung down to block his way.  At first, he followed a faint game path, but, then, lost his way.  For twenty minutes, he forged ahead, slipping on fallen logs where ear-shaped toadstools were sprouting from the damp wood, pushing forward through thorny brush elastic as a rubber band when it snapped at his face.  He climbed little hummocks buried in green foliage and, then, stumbled into small cellar-shaped pits jammed full of sticks and twigs and broken branches.  At last, he came to a dry stream bed that ascended the slope in a tunnel of brown and golden leaves clenched tightly over the ravine.  The water-course steepened and Winston had to twist around egg-shaped boulders and fallen trees barricading the place.  Above a big broken ledge, Winston found himself in a sepulchral vault, the crumbling limestone cliffs as high as the trees  curving up into a dome above him.  The way was impassible and, so, he descended the dry creek to a place where its banks were terraced with shattered yellow stones like irregular steps.Then, he went cross-country until he found a narrow track leading over a low-point in the ridge.

On the other side of the hill, the valley spread out beneath him, a river lounging between meadows where cows were grazing. Winston looked for the village with its brick steeple but couldn’t pick out that place in the narrow coulee beneath him.  It seemed that some houses and, possibly, a tavern or general store stood at an intersection about a mile away.  A white building like an old country school-house stood in a grove of trees between two fields that had not yet been harvested.  He had been in the woods longer than he thought – the air was now cooler and blue shadows were lengthening under the walls of the forest.  The dense mass of trees seemed to have been punctured and was leaking darkness over the land.  Winston knew that he was lost.  Breathing heavily, he sat for a while on the hillside, imagining a way down the slopes too steep to be farmed to the dark braid of the river.

Distances were deceptive.  The autumn haze seemed to act as a lens, as a great hazy magnifying glass, and it took him a long time to reach the road.  There was no traffic.  Far away, the lights in the village had come on.  Winston clawed his cell-phone out from under his orange vest but couldn’t get a signal.

Winston passed the structure that looked like a country school house. The building was white, an angular ice-berg in the gloom.  An ancient willow-tree stood near the path leading to the building and Winston glimpsed something squatting on the mown grass – it was a picnic table crouching like a tarantula in the darkness.  A brick outhouse with a tin rooster cupola caught a beam of light.  The moon rose over the hillside.

About a tenth of a mile down the road from the schoolhouse, Winston came upon a cemetery.  Some new burials were marked by imposing granite slabs, so smoothly polished that Winston could dimly descry his shadow in the stone as he passed.  In front of the granite monuments, little limestone tombs extruded from the sod, eroded down now into an appearance like broken molars poking up through the grass.  The little graves were lightless and caught no reflections at all and seemed even impervious to the moonbeams now decorating the country lane.

Winston heard singing.  It was unclear at first and he thought the voices were an artifact of his breathing, something in his sinuses or head.  He paused and scanned the dark landscape around him.  The hills were silent now except for choruses of frogs in the low, wet places.  The singing became louder.  The voices sounded and resounded, loud enough now to echo across the desolate pastures, the barbed-wire fence-lines, the black woods hovering over the cultivated land.  The voices were quite clear, well-organized, making harmonies with the bell-shaped notes that they sang.  Winston couldn’t understand the words – it sounded to him like Russian, except that he had never heard Russian except in movies, or some kind of Dutch.  The songs came quite close to him, as if the melodies and chords wanted to guide him down the moonlit lane.

Then, a pickup emerged over the crest of the one-lane bridge back by the willow tree and the white building.  Winston waved his arms and the man driving the truck stopped for him.  It was too crowded for him to ride in the truck’s cab, but the driver said he could climb into the back of the pick-up.  The carcass of a deer sprawled across the pick-up bed, nose all snotty with gore.  Winston put his thorn-scratched hands on the velvet of the deer’s antlers.  Moonlight reflected dully from the deer’s open eye.
In town, the man driving the pick-up stopped.  Winston had service on his phone and called his buddies from the General Store.  He wanted to tell them about the voices that he had heard singing in the dark, but decided that the story would seem too eccentric and so he decided to remain silent on that subject.

2.
The winery was tucked under a dolomite crag about six-hundred feet above the river valley.  The driveway up to the tudor-framed chalet had been steep, through a south-facing vineyard that seemed stapled to the sheer side of the hill.  Aimee and Geoff sat at a table on the big deck jutting out over the Mississippi River valley.  The wine-tasting had finished and they were a little tipsy.  Aimee held a bottle of wine produced at this vineyard in her lap.

A waitress dressed in a black Tyrolean embroidered bodice over her white blouse came to their table and asked them if they wanted anything else.  People were laughing and chattering on the deck but the great river valley, miles wide from bluff to bluff, the powerful brown flood of the Mississippi concealed among lakes and lagoons and swamps, seemed strangely still and empty in the hot August sun.

Aimee said that the artisanal sharp cheddar cheese served as an accompaniment to the wine was wonderful.  She asked if the cheese were for sale at the winery.  The waitress shook her head, but said that the cheese was, indeed, locally made.  “I can draw you a map as to how to drive to the farm,” the waitress said.  She remarked that it was about 18 miles away, the dairy located in one of the coulees extending out from the river the way that boughs branch from the trunk of a tree.  Aimee slipped her sunglasses up over her forehead and watched carefully as the waitress sketched some line on a napkin.  Geoff looked at his watch.  They were on an afternoon excursion from LaCrosse and he wanted to return home before it was too late.

They walked to the parking lot and drove their old Volvo down the steep driveway to the winding road that led up from the river bottoms to the bluff tops.  On the ridges, the land fell away in all directions, vividly green ravines and coulees extending in all directions between veins of hilltop, blonde with corn fields and sloping pastures.  The map turned out to be useless.  The waitress hadn’t included any scale and, so, Geoff didn’t know where to make the turns leading to the dairy farm.  After a while, they were lost, driving aimlessly in the bottom of the valleys, farms sometimes pressed close to the road or across the rivers that flowed like lanes of dark silver in the troughs of the coulees.  In this country, one place looked pretty much like another – the roads ran parallel to the streams or crossed them climbing up through dark, tangled woods to uninhabited ridges and, then, curving down into the adjacent valleys.  The countryside was strangely empty, abandoned, it seemed, with ruined silos like gravestones marking the places where farms had once been.

Aimee pointed to one of the barns.  “Hex,” she said.  On the side of the old red-painted barn, a geometric shield had been painted – it was weather-beaten and faded but still legible, a six-pointed star in a field of green and yellow.  Each barn that they passed was marked with a similar sign, although the geometries of the hexes, and the freshness of the paint, varied.  “Must be a bad witch problem here,” Geoff said.  “What do you mean?” Aimee said, looking over her sunglasses.  “The signs are supposed to scare off witches,” he told her.  “Witches are a sexist fantasy,” Aimee said.  “So you say,” Geoff said.

They quarreled a little because the wine had made their heads ache and it was growing late.

A town appeared ahead with a general store and fortress-like brick steeple above a church.  They passed a little white building that looked a township hall, half hidden behind a willow, and an old graveyard.  Beyond the town, a place that didn’t appear on Geoff’s map, they turned onto a gravel crossroads, following a sign that pointed to a place that Aimee recalled passing earlier in the day.  The gravel road passed through some tall corn and, then, rose above a contour plowed field planted in greasy green soybeans.  Ahead of them, a woman was jogging.  She was running with a loose, inefficient gait, head down, and, apparently, wearing ear-buds because she didn’t acknowledge them as the Volvo approached her from behind.  “It’s an odd place to be jogging,” Aimee said.  “No houses or farms anywhere around,” Geoff replied.

The woman didn’t waver from her lane in the middle of the road.  She seemed exhausted, arms flailing and each stride a lunge.  Geoff swerved carefully to the side, driving almost in the weeds of the oncoming shoulder, to pass her.  As the car went by, he looked to his right, across Aimee, and saw the woman’s profile – a white eye rolling a little and her mouth open wide and gasping for air.  The Volvo ascended the steep hill on which the woman was running and Geoff turned his eyes to his rear-view mirror.  He saw the woman’s face for a moment smeared across the glass in front of him and, then, the yellow fog of dust trailing behind the car on the gravel road covered her.

They drove in silence to the crest of the hill, about a mile beyond where they had seen the jogger.

Geoff pulled into a weed overgrown drive next to a silo built with old brown tiles.  It looked like lightning had struck the silo and split it open.

“Did you see her?” Geoff asked.

“Yes,” Aimee said.  “Something was wrong.”

“She isn’t jogging,” Geoff said.  “She’s running away from something.”

“I don’t know,” Aimee said.  “But she did look sort of ... terrified.”

Geoff held out the back of his arm.  “Look,” he said.  The hair on his arm was bristling.  “That’s how it affects me,” Geoff said.

He pulled onto the road and began to retrace the way that they had come.

“What are you doing?”  Aimee said.

“We should try to help her,” Geoff said.

“I don’t want to see her face again,” Aimee said.  “It’s too disturbing.”

“We have to help,” Geoff said.

They drove back down the hill without encountering the woman-jogger.  At the base of the hill, the road crossed the river on a one-way bridge, marked as unsafe for trucks.

“Now what?” Aimee said, pouting.

“We go back to LaCrosse,” Geoff said.  “We should have never come out here in the first place.”

“It was your idea,” Aimee said.

“No it wasn’t.”

A chill had come between them.  The wine in their bellies was turning into sour irritation with one another.  Both of them had classes to teach in the morning and it was time to go home.



3.
Reverberation is the sound makes as sound decays into silence.  Reverberation time measures the period that lapses between the impulse creating the sound and the silence that follows when echoes have ceased.  The nature of the energetic impulse creating the sound, the acoustic qualities of the space through which the sonic energy propagates, temperature, humidity, and the quality of the surface from which the sound rebounds will determine reverberation time.  This period may be measured by equipment timing the reverberations or can be calculated theoretically using complex mathematical models including Fourier transforms.  Some scientists claim that the calculations show that reverberation time tends toward infinity.  This means that, if there were a sufficiently sensitive monitor capturing the faintest echoes of echoes, we might hear, for instance, Lincoln speaking at Gettysburg – the President’s voice was said to be a "thin tenor" and "shrill as a boatswain's whistle."  But such equipment doesn’t exist and conjecture of this kind is fruitless.

All energy reverberates.  The reverberation of light is called reflection.  Taste gives way to aftertaste and smell resonates in sinus cavities in the skull.  People speak of “muscle memory”, a reverberation in touch and motion of some gesture or response previously learned.  And, indeed, memory is the reverberation of neurons firing in the brain, an after-image of the electrical impulses that make up thought and sensation.  Collective memory reverberates into traditions and folk knowledge.  Historical events reverberate in books and images and their consequences spread through the world.  Every sound and sensation that we experience is posterior to some impulse in the world that we can’t directly experience – human consciousness itself is a reverberation of energetic impulses mediated through mirroring systems.  Angels, devils, and God don’t experience reverberation.  There are no echos in heaven or hell.  For these beings, all events are simultaneous because time does not exist in the inferno or paradise.

4.
Aimee’s subject was Women’s Studies.  Geoff worked as a teaching assistant in the Department of Engineering at the University, although he was completing a doctoral degree in Mathematics.  Aimee’s thesis was on the role of women in Wisconsin’s Freie Gemeinde – that is, Free-thinking Congregations.  In the mid-19th century, many German immigrants rejected organized religion and opposed State-sanctioned warfare.  These immigrants founded communities of free-thinkers and, often, built halls where they could meet.  Most Freie Gemeinde sponsored choirs and singing societies and, even, marching bands.  Music was an important element in their meetings.

The State Historical Society in Milwaukee possessed an extensive collection of Freie Gemeinde materials.  Twice a month, Aimee made the four hour drive to consult those materials.  Her German was reasonably good, but she needed help deciphering the Victorian handwriting, so-called Suetterlinschrift in which many of the letters and documents were written.  As a result, Aimee worked long hours with an older man, an immigrant himself, who could decrypt the tiny, indistinct letters.  She had an affair with the man, a relationship that she ended when her research was complete.  Aimee confessed her infidelity to Geoff and, after some unpleasant scenes, he said that he would forgive her.  By this time, they had a child together, Wilhelm, and their debts made it impractical for them to separate.  Aimee made Geoff promise that he would never mention the affair again – that was the condition of their reconciliation.

Geoff’s professors told him that his outline for his thesis in mathematics was without originality.  They suggested that he seek his doctorate in applied mathematics.  Geoff agreed to submit a paper on some mathematical aspects of acoustics involving Fourier Transforms.  But the subject didn’t inspire him and he put off writing the paper for several years, before, finally, conceding that the project would never be completed.  Having abandoned his thesis, Geoff lost his position at the University.  He took some classes on education and was hired as a substitute teacher with the local school system.

One Sunday afternoon in August when the campus was deserted for Summer Break, Aimee and Geoff drove back up the river valley to tour wineries in Trempeleau and Buffalo counties.  Wilhelm accompanied them and, late in the day, they stopped for a tasting at the vineyard with the Tudor-style chateau tucked under the dolomite crag on the bluff-top.  The artisan cheddar cheese was as good as Aimee recalled and, again, she asked the waitress in her Tyrolean outfit to tell them where they could buy this product.  The waitress drew a map on a napkin again, but, this time, Aimee troubled her for distances and the letters identifying the county roads and, also, wrote down the name of the dairy farm that made the cheese.  When she entered the name into her cell-phone, an address appeared and directions.  Geoff said that the Liebfraumilch had made him drowsy and that he wanted to turn around and drive home, but Aimee insisted that they go to the farm to purchase some of its artisan cheese.

Beyond the bluff crowned with stone, valleys thrust their slender fingers out and away from the river.  They drove on an asphalt lane through a long picturesque valley, passing farmsteads built on green terraces above the meander of a creek in the bottom of the coulee.  In some places, the road was flanked by corn fields with bright-yellow tassels shining atop the densely woven palisades of stalk.  Apple orchards with squat, determined-looking trees were rooted in some of the higher meadows.  The velvet-green wall of the forest, soft with vines and berry bushes and poison ivy, marked the place where the slopes became steep and wild rising to rocky ridge-tops.

Aimee picked-out the farm, a great barn rising over the bone-white house and steel outbuildings.  The timber prow of the barn looked like a seagoing vessel somehow run aground on the hillside.  A half-dozen cats, indifferent and regal, were lounging about the farmyard.  On the crest of the barn, a hex sign painted in the old Pennsylvania Dutch Distelfinks emblem looked down like a single eye on the narrow gravel lane spanning the flooded creek and leading up to the house.

The farmer was burly wearing ill-fitting jeans and with a red beard, and a hand missing several fingers.  He was friendly, but said that he had consigned the last of his sharp cheddar cheese to the General Store in Waunmandee.  He gave them directions while urging them to buy a jar of honey from his bees.  As she paid for the honey, Aimee asked: “What does the hex sign mean?”  “It’s for luck,” the farmer said.  “When you farm, you need a lot of luck.”  “I thought they were to scare away witches,” Geoff said.  “Them too,” the farmer replied grinning.  The honey was cloudy with wax and bits of comb.

Geoff turned around the Volvo and Wilhelm waved to the farmer as they went back toward the county road, cautiously clearing the small steel span over the creek.  The bog-colored water was high, brimming over the banks and making them slimy with dark mud.

Waunmandee was over the ridge in the next valley.  The coulee was lush and mostly deserted with the forests spilling down from the steep hillsides to the rounded embankments huddled around the river.  The village was marked by a brown brick steeple as sullen as fence-post rising over a few small, pale buildings at an intersection.  Two convertibles were parked in front of the general store, city folk from Madison or Milwaukee exploring the boondocks on a summer afternoon.  The shelves in the store were  a jumble of items, canned food and cereal, shears for castrating hogs and rings to insert in the noses of bulls, rat and mouse traps, fly strips, and many kinds of household poisons, guns and ammunition, and an old cooler holding deer sausage, artisan cheese, and a couple home-made pies.  Aimee bought some cheese and, also, three slices of the lingonberry pie, scooped into styrofoam trays “to go.”  She asked about the Freie Gemeinde hall in town.  The old woman at the cash register pointed along the main street out into the green and pleasant country.  “It’s about 20 rods from the cemetery, down the same road,” she said.

They found the Harmonia Hall without difficulty.  A big willow tree made many green veils partially concealing the old structure.  The Hall was one-story with a small boxy steeple on its ridge-line, without ornament or decoration and glacial under a thick coat of white-wash.  A lean-to porch was on the back of the building, sheltering a concrete patio where three picnic tables were located.  Another picnic table stood in the open air between the building and a brick outhouse with a rust-red rooster mounted on its cupola.  In front of the building, a sign explained the history of the hall – the Freie Gemeinde had flourished between 1861, when the communities gathered for abolitionist rallies, and 1916.  Tensions preceding the Great War with Germany made the Freethinker’s associations suspect and, since most of their members were now elderly and infirm, the organizations simply disbanded.

“This is an old singing society,” Aimee told Wilhelm.  Between the droopy willow and the Hall, a swingset had been erected and there was a battered tin slide.  Wilhelm ran to the slide, climbed its ladder, and zoomed down it.  He did this several times, squealing with happiness, and, then, went down on his belly.  The slide disgorged him dive face-first into the gravel and, so, he stood up, nose bloody, and, crying, ran around the Hall to where Aimee and Geoff were sitting on the picnic benches under the shelter.  Aimee sent Geoff to the car for paper towels and, then, asked him why he didn’t bring the roll when he returned with a strip of towel wrapped around his wrist.  Geoff shrugged.  Aimee cleaned Wilhelm’s face and set a slice of lingonberry pie in front of him.  Instead of eating, the little boy got up and darted away, saying that he wanted to play on the swing-set.  “Should I go and watch him?” Geoff asked.  “No,” Aimee said, “He’ll be fine.  I want to talk to you about our relationship.”  “Okay,” Geoff said.

The hills with their conical tops cast long shadows.  The landscape was silent except for frogs belching in the ditches next to the county road.   Around the corner of the white hall, the rusty swing-set made a wheezing sound.  A cloud struck out the sun and, for an instant, everything seemed colorless, sculpted in uniform grey.         


5.
A journalist from LaCrosse attended the Waumandee choral competition and picnic in the Summer of 1893.  Excerpts from the article that appeared in the LaCrosse paper may be read in a book, Waumandee, Wisconsin 1860 - 1870, An Affectionate Portrait (Laverne Rippley).

Thomas Paine, a man greatly admired by the Freie Gemeinde, was born on February 9, 1737.  He died in June 1809.  February is a cold month in Wisconsin and, so, the Waumandee Freethinkers celebrated Thomas Paine’s life and thought, not on his birthday, but on the second weekend in June.  The custom had begun in 1884 in the year that marked the 75th anniversary of the great man’s death.  Each year around Easter, invitations were extended to other congregations of Freethinkers as well as to villages in the county with choirs and singing societies.  The Waumandee Freie Gemeinde possessed no fewer than 321 books in its library within the meeting hall.  Most of the books were printed in German, translations of Voltaire, Rousseau, and Thomas Paine, several copies of Lessing’s Nathan der Weise as well the collected works of Herder and Kant together with Schiller and Goethe.  On the morning of the picnic celebration, the society’s books by Paine were carried from the library and put on the podium under the lean-to shelter at the back of the Harmonia Hall.  Women brought pies made from apples, cherries, and strawberries as well mince-meat and strudel.  Chicken had been butchered in great numbers the night before and the meat was fried for the picnic.  Cauldrons of sauerkraut and kartoffelsalat were suspended over open fires and the air smelled of apple cider, bacon, and vinegar.  Banners decorated the austere front of Harmonia Hall, red, white and blue bunting and paper lanterns with candles were set in the trees shading the meadow behind the building.  Lime was poured into the toilets and bouquets of wild flowers were set on picnic tables.  More wild flowers in wreaths and garlands dedicated the speaker’s podium.

At about 12:20, the brotherhood hosting the picnic heard music on the dusty coach road in front of the Hall.  Freie Gemeinde singers had arrived from Alma and, also, Arcadia, marching in step, waving flags, and singing as they approached.  The Waumandee men’s chorus stood on both sides of the road and greeted them with a song of welcome.   Then, trumpets sounded and the Gesanggesellschaft (“singing society”) from Liberty approached, also raising on high a merry marching tune and accompanied by a cornet band.  Again, the Waunmandee brotherhood lined the pathway into their grounds, singing their welcome to the new arrivals.  More choirs arrived, some of them half-drunk on beer wagons.  The drum and fife corps from Arion came a little later, brandishing a banner that showed a handsome young man with curly hair riding on the back of a dolphin with a face like a bull-dog.  Beer was distributed from kegs and growlers and bottles sunk in the creek were fished-out, drizzling cold droplets on the grass.  Much of beer was brewed in Milwaukee by the Pabst family and some of the families that had been to the Columbian exposition in Chicago knew that the beer had been awarded a blue ribbon at the great fair.

After some competitive singing, people sat down to eat.  The meadow was a tapestry of blankets strewn across the rolling hillsides.  A speaker read from Thomas Paines’ Gesunder Menschenverstand and Menschenrechte and, then, some poems were recited and, from the pulpit, a conductor lead the massed choirs in patriotic songs ending with a thunderous version of “The Battle Hymn of the Republic.”  Bands played as the pies were cut and served.  More beer was consumed and people debated politics, sometimes quite loudly and, then, as the sun began to set, several of the men’s choruses hiked up into the woods and stationed themselves on opposing peaks to serenade one another and all the people in the valley.  Trumpets blazed on high and fireworks sputtered in the sky splashing red and blue and yellow sparks that rained down from above.  Then, the families, carrying sleepy children wrapped in blankets, departed along the dusty country road, silent except for the bells on the oxen and mules tinkling in the darkness.  The lanterns in the trees were lit and some brand-new electric lights shone, drooping down over the back porch of the Harmonia Hall and young people appeared, couples silently moving through the thickets and glades, parting the fronds of the willow tree, gathering to dance on the meadow behind the building.  A polka band sat among the beer kegs and made music and the young people danced until the moon came out and the wind rose to sweep through the trees and, still,the couples danced  until the grass underfoot was all slippery with dew.

The reporter from the LaCrosse Daily Republican proclaimed that “a good time was had by all in attendance”.


6.
The conversation with Aimee didn’t go well.  Geoff went to the car and found the Bounty paper towels and wiped his face and eyes.  His hands were trembling a little.

Wilhelm was standing motionless behind the Volvo, head cocked and staring at something in the grass – perhaps, it was a dead animal or some kind of remarkable insect.

“What are you doing, buddy?” Geoff asked.

“I was talking to the man and then we sang,” Wilhelm said.

“What man?”

“He went away,” Wilhelm said.  “There was a trumpet,” the little boy added.

Geoff closed his eyes for a moment and listened.  Other than the wind sorting through the fronds of the willow tree, it was silent.  “I don’t hear anything,” Geoff said.  “It went away,” Wilhelm replied.

The drive back to LaCrosse seemed to take them a long time and no one had much to say.

A couple weeks later, Geoff couldn’t find his phone charger.  He thought he might have left it on Aimee’s desk and so he looked there among her papers.  Pushed into a cubby hole, Geoff found a small paperback book, apparently self-published with text that looked like typescript.  A couple of badly reproduced photographs showed old-time farmers staring at the camera and a band of cornets of different sizes carrying a banner on which a boy was riding some kind of fish.  The name of the book was Waumandee 1860 - 1960: An Affectionate Portrait.  Among the book’s pages, a note in handwriting that Geoff didn’t recognize directed the reader to several pages that described a picnic at the Harmonia Hall.  A stamp inside the volume’s front cover showed that the book belonged to the Wisconsin State Historical Society.

Geoff didn’t plan to say anything about the book.  So he was surprised when he heard himself suggest that Aimee return the book to the historical society by mail.  She bristled.

“I thought you promised to never speak of this again,” Aimee said.

“How am I speaking about it?”

“How are you not?”

“I’m just saying that it would be more convenient to return the book by mail than drive eight hours coming and going to Milwaukee.”

“This is none of your business,” Aimee said.  “You want to control me.”

They didn’t talk.  They shouted.  Wilhelm cowered in the other room.  At last, Geoff left the house and went to spend the night at an Americinn on the edge of town.  At first, they agreed to a separation.  Geoff found an apartment, half of a duplex in a part of town where African immigrants lived.  Aimee brought Wilhelm to Geoff’s apartment on the weekends.  Geoff didn’t have a bed for his son.  The boy slept in a sleeping bag unrolled on the carpet in the living room.  The separation became a divorce.  Geoff worked full-time teaching 9th-grade math at the High School – he taught geometry and remedial arithmetic.  To earn a little extra money, he drove an activity bus, dropping students off along a route that went through town and the farm country in the broad valleys nearby.  Part of the route traversed gravel roads and, when the bus lurched over those washboard-ribbed lanes kicking up clouds of yellow dust, Geoff recalled the jogger that he had once glimpsed far out in the country.  The memory was like a nightmare that came to him predictably every afternoon when his bus first rolled off the asphalt onto the rough road.  The world was full of peril and ambush – at least, that was how Geoff saw things.

Each weekend, Geoff took Wilhelm to church.  He had not been faithful in attendance before the divorce but he wanted to give his son some sense of safety and stability – in fact, he even hoped that Wilhelm could be confirmed.  Wilhelm didn’t believe in God and, like his mother, he was an enemy to organized religion, an institution that he thought hypocritical.  The boy said that he didn’t want to attend church and that it was ridiculous and violated his principles.  One Sunday, after services, Geoff was distracted by his son’s sullen opposition to worship, and, absent-mindedly, walked out of the church carrying the green hymnal that he had been holding.  The hymnal was the color of a forest in late May, deep green and incised with a trifoliate rose etched in gold.  It was a handsome volume and Geoff kept planning to return it to the Church.  But, then, Aimee moved to Madison where she had been offered a full professor position at the University and Geoff saw his son only once a month.  He had to drive to Mauston to pick up the boy at a truck stop on the freeway midway between Madison and LaCrosse.  There was no point in attending worship services any longer and, so, Geoff stop going.

In the Fall, Geoff coached the girls cross-country team.  Sometimes, he trotted along with the team members.  The girls ran from the school on the edge of town into the country, jogging along lonely country lanes that passed through deep, abandoned valleys, ruins of old farms crouched against the bluffs and lonely silos standing on hilltops among ancient groves of trees that had once sheltered long-gone houses.  The route ended at quarry cut into the side of one of the hills, a big square cleft in the landscape with sheer rock sides the color of a number 2 yellow pencil.  Although the drive-way into the quarry was chained off, the girls could slip around the gate and wander into the center of the big notch in the bluff.  Sometimes, they sang in that place, listening to their voices echo and re-echo off the steep cliffs.  Then, they ran back, downhill, a couple miles to town.

Once, when Geoff was running behind the girls, he sensed something was wrong.  The hair on his arm stood up and he stopped abruptly, whirling around to see if something was following them.  The girls were scrawny, just skin and bones, and they had very white faces and, one of them, in her sweat pants and hooded sweat-shirt had stopped to massage her calf.  “Are you okay?” Geoff asked.  “It’s just a cramp,” she said.  He walked toward her, trembling a little with the memory of the other jogger.  He thought – Everything scares me.  I’m always jumpy and afraid.  The girl’s face brightened as she saw him approach and, then, she stood up, squared her shoulders, and began to run toward him.  “I’m okay, Coach,” she said.  Geoff waited for her to run past him and, then, he followed at a slow trot.  He was troubled.

Geoff saw a physician’s assistant at the Clinic and said that he was afraid all the time.  She referred him to a doctor and he was given some pills for anxiety.  A month later, Aimee called Geoff and said that she had been offered a position at Yale in New Haven, Connecticut.  Geoff said that he couldn’t let her leave the State.  He spent money with a lawyer opposing her move but it was to no avail.  The judge said that Aimee could take Wilhelm to New Haven on the condition that she pay to fly the boy back to Wisconsin four times a year.  The judge, a woman, seemed very impressed that Aimee would be teaching at Yale.

At first, Geoff was relieved.  Wilhelm didn’t like him and said that he detested his visits.  He preferred to remain with his friends in Madison.  And Geoff didn’t have much to say to the angry teenager – when they were together, they mostly ignored one another.  But there was injustice to being separated from Wilhelm and the more Geoff thought about the injustice the sadder he became.  It was further evidence that the world was full of unforeseen hazards.  Geoff found that he couldn’t sleep at night.  Bad dreams plagued him.  He tried to control his fear by taking two anti-anxiety pills when he supposed to swallow only one.  When he ran out of pills too soon and the pharmacist wouldn’t replace his medicine, Geoff began to drink heavily.  One night, when he drunk, he tried to slit open his wrist.  He cut himself in several places deeply enough to require stitches and, when the emergency room doctor saw his wounds, the physician called security and had Geoff escorted to the Psych Ward.  He was placed on a 72 hour hold and, then, agreed voluntarily to a ten-day in-patient hospitalization.  For a couple of months, his moods were erratic – it took some trial and error to adjust Geoff’s anti-depressant medication.

The Christmas holidays were bad for Geoff and he broke up with his girlfriend.  But he had stopped drinking and, somehow, made it through the empty days and the long, dark nights.  Sometimes, he took the green hymnal down from the shelf by the TV and sang.  He couldn’t read music, but the book provided the words to the hymns that he sang.  He felt a little better when the holidays were over and school began again.

The Winter was dark and stormy.  The river froze, but was somehow alive and active under its white mantle so that jagged blue-green shards of ice dammed the span between the piers under the bridges.  Ragged fangs and spears of ice crowded against the river banks and growled in the darkness.  Geoff told his therapist that he was bored and lonely and that his mind was running in futile loops.  More adjustments were made to his medications and the counselor suggested that he try to meet new people.  On an impulse – it was five days before Valentine’s day – Geoff drove downtown and went into a bar that he had frequented during his college days.

Mid-week, the place was dead.  The marquee over the sidewalk said that there was karaoke in the tavern.  But no one was singing when Geoff entered, went to the bar, and ordered a Diet Coke.  In an alcove next to some folding chairs, a stack of speakers was emitting muted screams and the rattle of gunfire and explosion sounds.  A kid who looked too young to be alone in the tavern was playing a first-person shooter game projected on a screen in the niche.  The wand of a rocket-launcher waved back forth on the screen blasting away at lizard monsters.  When Geoff asked about the karaoke, the barmaid said that the kid was playing on the system.  Geoff asked if he could try singing with machine.  “Sure,” the barmaid said.  Geoff left a dollar tip with her and sat at a table near where the kid was slaying monsters.  He had another Diet Coke, left two dollars as a tip this time, and, then, went outside to make a phone call.  The night was bitterly cold and spinning snow flakes made a halo around the street lights.

When Geoff came back into the tavern, the kid was gone.  He went to the karaoke machine and found a play-list.  Most of the songs were unfamiliar to him.  He sang “Wonder Wall” by Oasis – the sound was tinny, like something heard over a telephone and the microphone felt sticky in his hand.  But he got through the song and the barmaid clapped a few times for him.  Then, he sang “Hey Jude” and the B-52's “Love Shack”.  A few people gathered around him and Geoff gave them the microphone.  Two young men, obviously drunk, sang together, passing the microphone back and forth: they performed “Folsom Prison Blues” and “Paradise by the Dashboard Light”.  During the instrumental breaks, the young men jumped up and down and played air-guitar.

Before closing, Geoff bought the two men beers.  One of them, wearing a tattered black Ramones tee-shirt, said that his name was Winston.  He told Geoff that he and his friend had played together in a band when they were in college and it was fun for them to get a chance to sing again.  On the street, snow was falling and their windshields were crusted with ice.  Geoff said that they should get together to sing again, maybe, next week on the same night.  Winston nodded reluctantly, but his friend seemed enthusiastic.  They shook hands and parted.

A week later, Geoff went to the bar, drank a couple of Diet Cokes, and tipped the waitress five dollars.  The place was mostly empty.  Geoff sang again with the machine.  Everyone else ignored him.  But, just as we was ending, Winston arrived.  He said he wasn’t really drunk enough to sing in public.  Winston and Geoff spoke for awhile, seated in a booth next to the pool tables.  Geoff wrote his address on a napkin and handed it to Winston.  He said that it would cheaper and more fun if they just sang together at Geoff’s place.  “We can practice,” Geoff said.  Winston said that he would come to see Geoff and bring his buddy from their old band.

“No strings attached?” Winston asked.

“None,” Geoff said.

Geoff bought a bottle of vodka and two liters of coke for his guests, but suspected that they would not show up.  To his surprise, Winston came to his house, but without his friend.  Geoff made him a drink.  After talking for awhile, Geoff suggested that they practice singing some hymns.  He got the green book down and set it between them on the table, next to the bucket of ice and the bottle of vodka.

They sang for about an hour.  Geoff made Winston several drinks.

“You know you can’t really be pissed-off at anyone when you’re singing,” Geoff said.

Winston nodded his head: “That is very true,” he replied.

Geoff said that there should be singing societies.  Instead of armies, countries should have immense choirs in which membership would be mandatory.  Instead of battles, countries should wage war at singing competitions. “There shouldn’t be any ideas or politics or theology.  Singing should just be pure, for its own sake,” Geoff said.  “People are always singing for a purpose or to send a message of some kind.  Singing shouldn’t be entangled in so many other things.”

They sang another half-dozen hymns.  Winston seemed a little drunk.  Geoff wasn’t supposed to drink because of drug-interactions with his medications but, nonetheless, he mixed himself a coke with just a dash of vodka.  When they sang “The Battle Hymn of the Republic”, Geoff felt the power of the song surge through him.  His voice suddenly contained multitudes.  He was at the forefront of a great legion marching righteously from the past into the present and everyone was singing and he felt the music reverberating within his breast and, then, rolling in a great martial tide from hilltop to hilltop.

When the last note ceased its echo, Geoff took up a paper-towel and wiped the tears from his eyes and cheeks.

“That was wonderful,” he said.

“Great,” Winston said.

“We should form a singing society,” Geoff said.

Winston looked dubious.  “It’s my mania...my mania talking,” Geoff said.  “Grandiose, I guess.  I’m bi-polar.”

Winston shrugged.  “Let me tell you something freaky, really freaky that once happened to me,” Winston said.  He tilted his glass toward Geoff who poured more vodka for him.  Then, he told Geoff about how he had once been lost while deer hunting and the strange thing that had occurred to him.