Memorial to Love

Wilma Ann couldn’t tell you this story.  Neither could anyone who knew her.  In a way, the point of the story is that there’s no one who could tell it.  And it’s not a new story, either, but, rather, a variant of a tale written by H. G. Wells.  So you have to imagine that the story is told by someone who knows more about Wilma Ann than Wilma Ann knows about herself.  Maybe, Wilma Ann’s guardian angel is telling you this story.

Little Wilma Ann’s guardian angel went with her on the afternoon that Howie got his head knocked-off.  In fact, it was probably her guardian angel that protected her on that August day in 1984.  Wilma Ann was nine and she went fishing with her brother, Howie, and her cousins Zip and Tapp.  Howie was fourteen, then, the oldest, and he led them to the railroad tracks beside the river-town stretched along the Mississippi under the high bluffs with their fragile-looking peaks and pinnacles.  The bluffs were directly above the town to the extent that sometimes, after a particularly violent freeze and thaw, boulders would get pried loose and plummet downward – there were two houses in the village smashed by huge rocks the size of a pick-up truck: one of them was so crushed it was never rebuilt and remained as a ruin for the children to explore, trespassing to gaze at the mighty dolomite stone in the living room, crushing the carpet and next to the TV in what had once been someone’s house; the other stone, smaller and only the size of a bushel basket, had sliced through that home’s shingle-roof and landed next to a crib where a baby was sleeping.  Zip and Tapp knew that story well because the baby grew up to be their uncle, a man named Mort who never spoke and might be encountered in the river bottoms where he hunted squirrels and dragged catfish out of the mire.  If you met Mort, the word was you should go the other way because he was not one of god’s happy people.

But on that August day, Howie led Wilma Ann and the twins, Zip and Tapp to the abandoned railway trestle and he told them to not look down as they crossed the lagoon and, then, they hiked on the island cut off from shore by the wandering channels of the Mississippi River to the edge of the channel.  They fished, but didn’t catch anything, made lances that they hurled at squirrels and, then, stood waist deep in one of the ox-bow lakes trying to spear catfish, also without success.  It was hot and, when the wind died down, the mosquitos and gnats rose from the marshes in black stinging haze and drove them back to the ramshackle railroad trestle where Howie again told the younger kids to not look down as they crossed on the ties and tracks and, then, someone said that they saw Mort, standing in the shadows of the forest, watching them.

On the other side of the lagoon, the Milwaukee road right-of-way ran parallel to the state highway nestled under the high river bluffs.  Howie knew the train schedule pretty much by heart and they hiked along the gravel embankment, the hot railroad tracks shining like silver blades in the sun.  The train was coming around four o’clock and so Howie took some pennies from his pocket and set them in a row on the scalding railroad track – if the train wheel caught the pennies just right, it would twist them into exotic shapes.   Zip and Tapp said that they were thirsty and didn’t want to wait for the train.  So they scrambled down the steep embankment on the road side of the tracks and, then, walked uphill to follow the road a few hundred yards into town.  There was a Kwik Trip on the edge of the village built beneath the cemetery with the slender, flame-shaped cypress trees. 

Howie squatted close to the track on its river side, watching over the coins that he had placed on the track.

“Will it derail the train?” Wilma Ann asked.

“Not a chance,” Howie said.  He gestured for Wilma Ann to slide down the slope into the glade of sumac at the foot of the embankment.  “I don’t want you near the tracks when the train goes by,” he said.

The train appeared down along the big, lazy curve a mile south of town.  The road-bed wasn’t well-maintained in this area and so the train approached, moving more slowly than the cars on the state highway running parallel to the track.  The engineer must have seen Howie because he blew the horn, or, perhaps, this was just protocol when approaching the village where there were several crossings protected by motorized gates.  As the train passed Howie, the grass on the side of the embankment was blown flat and the sumac rattled over Wilma Ann and, then, something – a bolt or a plate of metal or, perhaps, an improperly welded ladder rung – shot off one of the cars and hit the fourteen–year old boy.  Howie dropped without a sound, smashed down as if clubbed by a sledge hammer.  The train was indifferent and continued rolling forward and, when the caboose lurched by, Wilma Ann clambered up the embankment to where Howie was resting on his belly.  Most of his head was gone and yellow bone shone in the wound and a few yards away, part of Howie’s scalp was drooping down from a thorn bush.

Wilma Ann tried to roll Howie over to see if his face was still attached to his head but couldn’t get him to move.  She began to scream in a high-pitched voice and ran down the embankment and up onto the highway where several cars stopped for her since she was howling and running down the middle of the highway. 

Howie was buried in a closed casket.  The Milwaukee Road paid $250,000 dollars, although they blamed Howie for invading the train’s right-of-way.  Wilma Ann thought about the accident all the time and had to hospitalized.  She said that Howie was her guardian angel and that he had saved her from death on the day of the accident.  – Why had he died and she been spared? this question tormented her. Sometimes, at night, she sneaked out of the house and went to the cemetery on the terrace above the Kwik-Trip.  She groomed Howie’s grave, sweeping it clear of twigs and fallen leaves, and sometimes fell asleep on it. 

Years passed, but the sorrow didn’t go away.  It simply receded into a place in her mind where the grief was mostly inaccessible.  Her parents bought her puppy a few months after Howie died and the dog grew up to be her faithful friend and companion – but dogs have short lives and when the animal died, ten years later, the sorrow locked away in her brain poured out and Wilma Ann was inconsolable for a month, too sick with grief to go to school – she was, then, attending the community college in LaCrosse.  Then, her mother sold the old Chevy that was marked on its back window with a decal of a smiling boy holding a fishing rod and Howie’s dates.  Wilma Ann couldn’t bear the idea of someone else driving the car marked with Howie’s memorial decal and she was again incapacitated for several weeks.  She lost her job at Kwik Trip, work that she had taken when she quit college.  During the long winter, she returned to her parents’ home and spent most of the days sleeping – at night, she played on the computer, afraid to fall asleep in the dark because of nightmares that troubled her. 

A good friend attended college in Madison and Wilma Ann borrowed her mother’s car for a weekend visit.  Saturday was warm and the girls went to the B. B. Clark beach on Lake Monona.  They drank beer and, every half hour, dipped themselves in the water, still cold from the winter months.  Wilma Ann’s friend had a crescent moon tattooed on her ankle.  “Did that hurt?” Wilma Ann asked.  “It was pretty bad,” the girl said, adding:   “The skin’s thin and there’s bone underneath and it really burns.”  Wilma Ann said that she was deathly afraid of needles and wondered how anyone could bear to be tattooed.  “It’s help to be drunk,” her friend said.

That night, the girls took a cab downtown and bar-hopped.  Wilma Ann’s friend pointed out the little storefront where she had been tattooed.  “The place is run by a girl and so it’s pretty much okay,” her friend said, “You know, not creepy at all.”  The sign by the door said Terri’s Ink.  Wilma Ann was pretty drunk, giggling continuously, and the girls had smoked a joint before leaving the apartment to come downtown.  The streets were like a carnival, crowded with kids and the doors to the bars were open and music spilled out into the night.  “You should dare me to get a tattoo,” Wilma Ann said.  “But you’re a pussy,” her friend replied.  “You’re deathly afraid of needles.”  “No,” Wilma Ann said: “You should dare me.”

The inside of the tattoo place was like a workshop or a beauty parlor.  Some heavy chairs, upholstered and big as thrones were arranged against the wall and there were work benches with tools on them and lights on swivels such as you might see in a dentist’s office.  The tattoo artist had gages in her ear lobes and a silver bulb piercing her tongue.  She was very nice, kind, it seemed, and understanding. Wilma Ann’s friend sat next to her on a stool and held her left hand.  Wilma Ann thought that there was a funny smell when the needle gun began to inscribe shapes and letters on her right upper bicep, but, perhaps, it was her imagination or the disinfectant like ether in the air.  The design was pretty simple and readily executed: a heart in a red outline in which cursive letters spelled HOWIE.  Below the letters, the year of Howie’s birth and his death were inscribed.  Something about the process, perhaps, the fear or the pain, smashed down a barrier in Wilma Ann’s heart and she began to cry, not in an agitated or excited way, but sobbing from deep in her belly and chest.  “Let it all out,” Wilma Ann’s friend said.  “He was my brother,” Wilma Ann said to the girl with the Solang tattoo-gun.  “Oh it’s all right,” the girl said, but her eyes were a little moist too. 

After it was over, Wilma Ann washed her face and said that she felt like she could do anything.  She pranced down the sidewalk and, then, sang Karaoke in a bar and, picking out some random guy, a man whom she imagined that she liked, trapped him at the bar and made him buy them both drinks until closing time and, then, when he tried to get her to come home with him, she kissed him on the mouth, put her tongue between his teeth, rubbed against his crotch and, then, left him pleading at the sidewalk when the cab came to whisk them away.  The next morning, Wilma Ann looked at the tattoo on her bicep – it was sore and felt a little crusty and she wasn’t entirely satisfied with its appearance, but she wasn’t exactly dissatisfied either and the tattoo was now part of her, like something accomplished by nature, irresistable like a boulder plunging down a steep hillside.

Two years later, Wilma Ann was pregnant.  Her boyfriend wasn’t much help.  He was someone that she had met at the speedway down by Fountain City and wasn’t ready to settle down.  Wilma Ann wanted the baby and decided that she would do this alone and, then, she had trouble, became very sick, and the gynecologist had to put a stitch in her uterus to keep the baby from falling out.  She was on bed-rest for four months and pretty much went stir-crazy.  When the child was born, it was a girl and sickly and had to remain at the hospital in an incubator for three weeks.  When the baby was old enough to come home from the hospital, Wilma Ann fed the child from her breast and the little girl thrived.  Wilma Ann celebrated by having a sun and a moon tattooed on her breasts, just above her nipples.  Then, when the little girl started kindergarten, Wilma Ann had a tattoo made on her wrist and forearm showing an adult’s hand gently holding the hand of a child: in cursive, the design was marked Forever. 

Wilma Ann married her daughter’s father.  She didn’t get a tattoo to commemorate the event.  Things went wrong and there was a divorce and, then, Wilma Ann became dependent on methamphetamine.  She wrote some bad checks and took money from her elderly mother and, finally, the police arrested her.  The county threatened to take her daughter away and, so, Wilma Ann agreed to in-patient treatment.  After she had been clean and sober for a year, she went to a tattoo place in Minneapolis and had wings inscribed over her shoulder blades.  A few weeks later, she had the same artist draw a bat with wings wide-spread perched on a femur inked into the small of her back.  Her mother died and Wilma Ann went back to the little town beneath the high river bluffs to live in the house where she had been raised, taking a job at the Kwik-Trip, her workplace after she dropped-out of college.  Howie was buried in the graveyard on the hillside above the Kwik Trip and, for her lunch break, Wilma Ann sometimes climbed the steep steps up to the cemetery to sit on a bench and survey the stones and the valley intricate with looping channels and dead-end lakes and, far away, the white ramparts of the Lock-and-Dam.

Wilma Ann’s daughter was a wild child and, when she was sixteen, she went to live with her boyfriend on a houseboat moored on Latsch Island at Winona.  Wilma Ann met two women from St. Paul who rented a summer cabin on the bluff overlooking the river – they came into the Kwik Trip every morning for coffee and doughnuts.  The women invited Wilma Ann to visit them in the Fall at their home near Como Park.  During her visit, they went to a gay bar, unmarked on a desolate stretch of University Avenue in the Midway District and, for a time, Wilma Ann thought that she might be a lesbian.  She experimented with that life-style for a year or two and had many adventures.  But she found that she was drinking too much and, again, had to seek treatment, although outpatient this time.  During this phase in her life, she had a zodiac mandala tattooed (painfully) onto her ribcage and, then, inscribed the Serenity Prairie between the wings and the bat on her back.  On one cheek of her buttocks, Wilma Ann had a skull tattooed wearing a garland of roses; on the other cheek, she had the artist mark her skin with the baby elephant from the movie Dumbo.

During her treatment at group, Wilma Ann met a quiet, sad-eyed man a few years older than her.  He had been in the war and suffered an injury to his brain when an IED exploded next to the vehicle in which he was riding.  The man was very gentle and said that there really wasn’t much that he wanted from life any more.  Wilma Ann fancied the man and, after a courtship of a few months, he came to live with her in the river town.  Every morning, he hiked up the hill up to the driveway leading to the hilltop winery and, then, jogged back down.  When the weather was nice, Wilma Ann and the man picnicked at Buena Vista park.  Wilma Jean was happy and she commemorated her joy with a flock of brightly colored monarch butterflies tattooed as if fluttering out of the crease of her elbow and, then, a wolf with a prismatic halo on her left bicep.  The man received social security and Wilma Ann was now managing the Kwik Trip, a business with a very large revenue, and, so, for the first time in her life, she had money to put away in a 401 K investment plan.  When her account reached $150,000, Wilma Ann felt pretty secure and, so, paid for a whole sleeve of tattoos – a complex tapestry of fairies and goblin and magical beasts wrapped around her left wrist and arm.  She bought a used Harley for her “significant other” (as she called him) and they rode through the deep and lonely valleys in western Wisconsin, traveling as far as the House on the Rock at Spring Green and, even, Madison.  Terri’s Ink was long since gone, replaced by a juice place specializing in smoothies.  But it was nice to be in the capitol city for the weekend and Wilma celebrated by having a tattoo of a rose vine inscribed on her hip, big ink that ran from her waist down to the side of her knee-cap.  The roses on the vine were florid, over-ripe and a few of them had drooped their petals down, red flakes falling to decorate her shins and calves.  Wilma Ann pleaded with her boyfriend to get a tattoo with her.  But he was afraid.  He said that when he had been wounded in Afghanistan, medics had taken his blood with big fat needles and he was deathly afraid of sharps. 

On the way home, Wilma Ann and her boyfriend stopped at a winery located in a remodeled dairy barn nestled against the side of a steep, south-facing hill.  Vines were braided around stakes and made seams on the steep slope, but many of the wines were also flavored with cranberries or blueberries.  Wilma Ann had lost the charge on her phone and, when her boyfriend tried to access Google Maps, the device told him that he had no service.  The vineyard was in a remote, hidden valley, a deep green cleft in the forested hills, and they weren’t exactly sure as to the best route to take home.  A waitress sketched a map for them on a napkin.  “We don’t want to ride on gravel,” Wilma’s boyfriend said.  “It’s all paved,” the waitress said, biting her lip a little: “At least, I think so.”

Wilma Ann used her credit card to buy some wine.  She put three bottles in the big leather purse that she slung over her shoulder.  Then, they left the vineyard and drove along the narrow county roads winding with the contours of the land.  Unexpectedly, the road turned to white, knuckle-sized gravel under them and Wilma Ann’s boyfriend cried out “Hold on!” as the motorcycle slid sideways and, then, spilled over in a spray of rocks.  Wilma Ann was flung off the Harley and she hit her head on a concrete culvert half-hidden in the ditch.  She flopped over on her back and saw the gauzy-winged dragonflies hovering above her – she tried to roll over but couldn’t move.  Her boyfriend, his clothing ripped and covered with blood, loomed overhead.  A cloud shaped like a running dog floated over head and a ray of sun made the dragon fly’s wings tremble with rainbow colors. 

A truck came along the road and, then, police and an ambulance.  The local hospital’s emergency room was staffed only with physician’s assistants and, ultimately, Wilma Ann was taken to a Level One trauma center associated with the University of Wisconsin in Milwaukee.  Her boyfriend had a broken wrist and had “road rash” on his knees and back but he recovered quickly.  Wilma Ann’s neck was broken and she was hospitalized for six weeks and had to be taught to walk again.  The doctors said that it was a miracle that she was not paralyzed.

After her medical leave lapsed, Wilma Ann returned to work at the Kwik Trip.  She was happy to be back on the job.  On the anniversary of the bad accident, Wilma Ann and her boyfriend went to LaCrosse where they planned to get matching “guardian angel” tattoos.  Wilma Ann looked at the designs available on-line and chose a pattern that was large and complex: a beautiful young woman with a face like a marble statue extended her hand; she had greenish-blue wings that seemed sculpted from glistening jade – smaller angels held an ivy garland over her head which was modestly covered with a blue shawl.  The cherubs had bare bellies and little stubby wings and there was a cursive inscription: The guardian angels of life fly so high as to be beyond sight (on a scroll above the figures) and (below the angels) But they are always looking down on us.

The tattoo parlor in LaCrosse was spotless, clinically white with ferns in baskets hanging from the windows.  Wilma Ann held her boyfriend’s hand as they discussed the tattoo patterns with the technician.  His tattoo was small, just a single white wing, incised into his right bicep.  They signed some paperwork and the technician, a gaunt-looking girl wearing big horn-rimmed glasses, processed payment on Wilma Ann’s credit card.  The war veteran said that he had to use the toilet.  He stood up, swivelled on his feet, and fell to the ground, the chain holding his wallet clattering on the tiles.  He had fainted dead away.  The friendly Labrador retriever, an old dog with grey whiskers on his jaw, approached the fallen man wagging his tail.  Wilma’s boyfriend opened his eyes.  He sat up and said that he was okay.  Wilma Ann told him that he didn’t need to get the matching tattoo and that he should go to the VFW a few blocks away, have a couple beers, and that she would call him when the work was finished.  The tattoo technician looked grateful and Wilma’s boyfriend seemed grateful too as he scratched the dog’s ears, and, then, went outside.

The ornate guardian angel pattern was designed for an upper arm.  It was six inches long and, about four inches across at its broadest point. 

“Where do you want it?” the technician said. 

Wilma pushed her blouse sleeve back over her right bicep.  “Make it there,” Wilma Ann said.

“You’ve got something already on your right bicep,” the technician said.  “But it’s old and faded, just some letters and numbers.  I can incorporate that into the guardian angel pattern.”

“That’s what I thought,” Wilma Ann said.

“Okay I’ll cover it then with the new pattern,” the technician replied.  “Is that okay?”

“It’s fine,” Wilma Ann said. 

Sensations of pain had changed in her body after breaking her neck.  The tattoo burned like fire and she flinched and tears rolled down her cheek as she clamped down hard with her teeth.  The fillings in her jaw ached.  She was relieved when the process was finally finished.

Her boyfriend was a little drunk when he came to pick her up.  Wilma Ann didn’t want to risk a drunk driving charge.  She took the wheel and they drove home.

A freight train was approaching on the tracks between the river and the village when they pulled into town.  The train hooted as it rattled along the right-of-way.

The sound didn’t disturb her.  The train’s whistle was the sound of home.