Wasioja

 

We returned to our old alma mater weary and footsore but jubilant.  The War was won and the farms were fresh and green with new fields of Spring wheat.  Not all of us came back, but there were enough enrolled in classes at our seminary to rouse our elderly professors from the melancholy wrought by the long and terrible conflict. The world was poised to begin anew.

The assembly rooms and corridors of the Free Will Baptist College were spotless, swept free of the wintry dust that had accumulated in our absence.  The great windows flooded the classrooms with light and the banister on the noble stair to the upper level was polished to a brilliant sheen.  The high limestone walls of the Seminary caught the dawn’s radiance and shone like Sambian amber.  Hewn from our quarries, the stone was assembled in its matrix of cream-colored mortar, firmly set under mustard-colored cornices of heavy timber.  The village along the river was joyous, wood framed mills straddling spillways and the stone weir bubbling over upstream.  The houses scattered across the open prairie were well-made, roofs shingled against the tempests, and the farms stood amid the flowering fields where peace reigned like a lazy Oriental potentate.  

The professors of Greek and Hebrew greeted us upon our return to the classroom.  It was sweet to study scripture in our seminary and to drink deeply from the springs of our pure and ennobling doctrine.  Everything was in order, established in its proper place.  The words of the text were arrayed in splendor and the faces of our fellow-seminarians were bright and ruddy and, even, the colored porter, Mr. Boggs, shone with the radiance of the angels kneeling before the Great White Throne.  

Although only four years had passed, a great and mysterious abysm of time separated our present happiness from that day on which we had set forth to save the Union.  Then, we were gathered in the Seminary and studying the Gospel when the word arrived that a Federal recruiter had arrived in town.  The man had come by ox-cart draped along its frame with red, white, and blue banners and we were told that he had come to the law offices of Mr. George close to our college.  The Hebrew professor gathered us together in our assembly hall and delivered a very fine speech and, then, we marched in procession, each and every student, to the little shed of dressed stone where the lawyer stood on the tribune of the recruiter’s two-wheeled cart outside of his chambers.  Mr. George also exhorted us to patriotic action and, then, we enlisted in the Grand Army of the Republic, every one of us save a sour, disagreeable fellow who muttered that the surely the Prince of Peace would disapprove our actions and that we would suffer thereby.  Even Mr. Boggs was accepted into the ranks of the Grand Army, although it was unclear how a colored man could serve our Cause, and, later, someone knocked the dissenter over the head with his cane and tossed the nay-sayer into the cold waters impounded behind the weir.  

We were trained at Fort Snelling and went by steamboat down the Mississippi to the theater of war.  The Seminary boys made our own regiment under the command of Colonel George.  The country to which we were sent was warm, swarming with mosquitos, and intricate with streams and fens and bogs.  Men died from sickness and were buried in the mud. Then, there were cannonades and sorties and, at last, a great assault against a high stony ridge, an Olympian height that trembled with level sheets of red shot and shell, thinning our ranks in a most awful manner.  Cannon balls burst among us and the forests on that mountain height were shredded to a mess of gory leaves and wood splinters in which torn, faceless men writhed in their death agonies.  After our charge against the rebel citadel, the war blurred and, it seemed, that we were groping over grim battlefields in a fog of black powder smoke.  Then, it was all over and we had returned and the Seminary of our Faith as Free Will Baptists welcomed us again and, now, the only smoke obscuring the light was the perfume of wood burning in cabin hearths and the tobacco in which we indulged (having acquired the vice in the War) while walking in the green shadows of the woods behind the college building, always taking care to conceal this peccadillo from our professors.

On one fine day, a dozen weeks after our return from the War, our Professor of Systematic Theology repeated words spoken by the melancholy Dane: “Nothing is good nor bad but that thinking makes it so.”  The idea was announced only to be refuted, but the Professor pointed out that, contrary to our imaginings, the roof to the Seminary was long since fallen away and that the windows were now but naked openings in the bare, ruined walls of our college.  And, looking upward, we saw that what he said was true and that we were huddled under a cold sky in the shattered remnant of the building, just four walls remaining upright around a sort of pit where we found ourselves gathered on broken stones dropped from the crumbling, ruined parapets.  The great oblong windows hung overhead, but were superfluous under the expanse of grey sky pressing down upon us.  The Professor continued to teach, but the rain fell and, then, sometimes, flakes of snow drifted down into the blasted structure and we shuddered with cold.

Outside, we heard engines.  Metal chariots zoomed past, visible in bright flashes between the elm trees.  When we tried to leave the wreckage of the Seminary, some strange enchantment held us between the ruinous walls and we were unable to set foot outside of the wrecked structure.   A fence made of woven steel surrounded the premises and, sometimes, we glimpsed strangely dressed people who peered at us through the diamond-shaped grid of metal wire.  The Greek professor told us to pay no mind to the visitors who didn’t concern us.  He recited conjugations of Koine verbs.  Seasons passed.  There was no freedom among the Free Will Baptists.  

Some flags hung outside of the ruined seminary beyond the fence and inaccessible to us.  Houses in the village burned down, orange flames flaring in the night.  The charred structures were not rebuilt.  A polished obelisk appeared, carved with the figure of a soldier in War of the Rebellion.  On some paving stones set in the turf, we could read our names, dimly discerned as if through tears.  In the corner of the Seminary, Mr. Boggs swept the rubble with a frayed broom and that scratching sound set our teeth on edge.  Someone said that the fence was not to protect the ruins of our College from further collapse, but to keep us confined so that we would not haunt the remaining homes in the desolate village nor the farms with their fat, indolent pigs nor the bitumen roadway where our presence might frighten the people passing in their bright motorized carts.  

Old Fort Gordon

 

A divorce petition? Eviction notice?  Car crash summons and complaint or notice of foreclosure?  Harvard didn’t know.  He was a civil process server and the content of the papers wasn’t any of his business.  It was his job to hand the envelope to someone, politely state: “You have been served,” and, then, exit the scene.  Sometimes, people were angry but mostly they just seemed stunned, as if their heart had skipped a beat or as if some strange, and, even, beautiful, landscape had just revealed itself before their eyes.  On occasion, people asked questions.  It wasn’t his job to answer questions.

Most of his work was within the seven-county Metro area.  Travel beyond the Cities and their suburbs was rare.  But this afternoon, Harvard found himself a hundred miles from the office, out in God’s Country, riding a rural highway to a village far from the Interstate.  The fields hadn’t been planted yet and they were either harrowed to black furrows or still yellow and brown with stalks leftover from last Fall’s harvest.  Signs along the right-of-way pointed to lonely churches concealed deep in the country, hidden by shelter belts and the brown islands of wood lots floating on the horizon.  Towers equipped to auger grain into bins stood sentinel over farms.  A metal roof over a hog house far away glinted in the sunlight like a strange, still lake.  

Harvard was from the suburbs, neither city nor country, and the straight, flat roads and the distant horizons hung with mournful clouds were foreign to him.  The air was bitter with the smell of pesticides and, then, sometimes sickly sweet with the stench of manure that trucks were spraying onto the fields.  The slant of light was different from city and suburb.  The space was open and intimidating and Harvard didn’t think that anything good could happen out here.

He found the village, built not along the highway, but next to the railroad tracks a half mile away.  There was a Casey’s gas station advertising slices of pizza at the intersection leading into town.  A couple of parallel streets lined with old brick storefronts comprised the business district.  There was a bank carved with a facade like a miniature Greek temple, some pillars crowned with chiseled leaves embedded in the pale, limestone wall.  Harvard parked his car apart from other vehicles, backing into the spot so that he could make a quick getaway.  He entered the bank and asked a teller to direct him to the person that he had been instructed to serve.  The man was sitting in a small office, fiddling with his computer.  A framed print of pheasants in flight was on the wall. The man had weak eyes and wore slightly tinted glasses.  Harvard knocked at the open door and, when the man answered, stepped into the room and handed him the envelope.  When he was told that he had been served, the man asked: “What is this?”  Harvard replied that he didn’t know.  He didn’t want to turn his back to the man and so he edged out of the office and, then, glancing over his shoulder, hurried out onto the street to his car.  

As he pulled onto Main Street, the man who had been served emerged from the bank, standing in the entrance between the pillars carved with wreaths at their tops.  The man looked at Harvard, squinting in the sunlight behind the tinted lenses of his glasses.  Harvard drove to the traffic light hanging over the intersection a block away.  No one was following him.  He stopped at the Casey’s on the county highway, bought some chips and a bottle of Mountain Dew and, then, started the trip back to the Cities.  Reimbursable miles ticked away under his tires.  The afternoon was bright and vast.

About eight miles from the freeway, Harvard saw a sign next to the road: Old Fort Gordon.  The sign pointed down a gravel road.  Harvard drove a quarter mile past the sign, but then made a u-turn and returned to the intersection that it marked.  He wondered what Old Fort Gordon might be, considering that it wasn’t likely that he would be in this neck of the woods again and, so, he thought: “What do I have to lose?”  He had no other appointments that afternoon and it was a Friday so he wasn’t in any particular hurry to get back to the office.  

The gravel road thumped and rattled a little under his car.  The road was on a low dike between swamps.  The marshland was empty, little round pools of water fenced by cattails strewn across the bog.  The prairie grass between the ponds was all flattened, crushed-down as if some great beast had rested on it.  After a mile, Harvard came to a line of trees, bent and twisted around a meandering creek full of stagnant motionless water.  No farmhouses were visible – apparently, the land was too wet to be productive.  Beyond the stream, the road bent in a wide arc toward a two-story structure alone in a copse of trees.  The field beyond the trees had been plowed and, at its black edge, there were several squat grain bins standing in the tall grass.    

The structure was solidly built, irregular yellow fieldstone in limestone mortar.  Wind-ruffled shingles covered the roof and there were several small square windows piercing the upper part of the building.  A broad wooden door, painted green, was closed on one side of the building.  Opposite to that opening, there was a man-sized door, held shut with a complicated-looking metal latch.  A sign posted next to the door was engraved with letters explaining that this block-house-shaped structure was old Fort Gordon.  The writing on the sign said that the fort had been built to shelter local families during the Indian wars, that the small square windows were rifle-ports, and that the broad door on the other side of the building was made to accommodate a Gatling gun.  

Harvard was puzzled by the sign.  He was a student of history and didn’t recall any Indian wars.  In fact, the local tribes had been friendly to the White pioneers – at least, that’s what he recalled from his High School history book.  Gatling guns weren’t used to fight Indians in any event.  Harvard couldn’t recall any movie or TV show in which weapons of that kind had been deployed.  

A complicated, spring-loaded latch held closed the man-door into the block-house.  Harvard had never seen a latch of this sort, a hasp with double hooks.  To his surprise, he was able to press open the latch and, with slight pressure, the heavy wooden door swung open on its hinges.  

The inside of the stone building was cold and smelled of straw.  Underfoot, the floor was hard, trampled dirt.  Beams of wan light slanted into the shadow, rays entering through the gap between windows and window-frames.  The place empty, heavy bare walls that seemed to lean inward.  It was silent, like the chapel of some austere iconoclastic cult that eschewed all trappings of religion, even the most bare altar, celibate with respect to not only its priests but its adherents.  Harvard touched the wall and felt the rocks embedded in the matrix of sandy, lime mortar.  Above, a third of the blockhouse’s floor space was under a frail-looking wooden platform, ten feet above the floor, made from some tree-limbs whittled into posts supporting a lattice of old lathe.  By design, it appeared that there was no ladder to reach the platform.  Probably, the structure was incapable of supporting the weight of even one person.  The sign outside said that as many as twenty families had sheltered in the fort’s second story.  This seemed questionable to Harvard.

When he turned to leave the fort, Harvard found the door had swung shut and, apparently, latched.  He pounded on the door but it didn’t budge.  Then, he put his shoulder to the door, pushing as hard as he could. But the door didn’t open.  He took a few steps back from the door and, then, hurled himself against it.  The door was solid and he bounced off, falling to the floor.

For awhile, he surveyed his surroundings. The windows fourteen feet above the floor looked as if they could be forced open, but there was no way to reach them.  From the inside the broader aperture for the hypothesized Gatling gun was barred with a steel brace.  The little slits at chest level were shuttered with wood.  

Harvard went to the door and pounded his fist against it.  After a while, pain in his hand made pounding on the heavy door impossible.  He leaned against the wall and felt the ancient chill from the walls spreading into his shoulders and back.  He returned to the door and kicked at it until the one of his toes cracked and went sideways.  Harvard buried his face in his wounded hands.  He couldn’t see out of the stone structure and so had no way of knowing whether traffic was passing on the gravel road.  It seemed unlikely, however, since the country lane didn’t seem to go anywhere in particular and most of the land for a mile around the structure was swamp.  It didn’t seem prudent to scream for help.  No one was around and crying out in that way would just sap his strength.

After awhile, the rays of sunlight entering around the windows were gone.  The stone cell was dark and its walls were cold as the rock in a cave.  Outside, Harvard heard the wind soughing in the bare oak trees.  An animal shrieked as if in pain.  Harvard thought of the settlers cowering in the barn.  He fell asleep and dreamed that the cavalry had arrived to save the pioneers.  When he awoke, he was very cold and shivering.  He was wearing a light suit and dress shoes and his feet felt like they were frozen.  Harvard found that he couldn’t get warm and he shivered so that his teeth clattered together.

Of course, one might think that the disappearance of a civil process server, a single man recently divorced, entrusted with important legal documents, might be a cause of concern and that search parties would be dispatched to find him.  But no one noticed Harvard’s absence until almost a week had passed and, by then, it was far too late for him.  Authorities interviewed the man with tinted sunglasses from the small-town bank, but he knew nothing about Harvard’s disappearance.  

Two weeks later, when it was quite warm, a cub scout pack from the county seat came to old Fort Gordon.  The den leader had volunteered the boys for some maintenance work at the fort.  They picked  up winter deadfall under the oak trees and stacked it to make a bonfire.  Two of the kids pushed lawnmowers to cut the grass.  It smelled bad around the stone building.  The cub scout leader thought that this was because older kids came to the place sometimes to smoke dope – he had done that himself when he was younger – and sometimes they used the stone structure for a restroom.  He fiddled with the latch and opened the door.  Some of the boys ran up to the entrance curious to see what was inside.  

“Don’t go in there,” the cub scout leader said with a catch in his voice.   

   

Emma Poniatkowski

 

1.

In those days, museum visitors ascended a great rise of stone steps to enter the exhibition halls.  Visitors were winded at the top and short of breath when they pushed through the heavy doors into the great echoing atrium full of towering dinosaurs and melancholy stuffed elephants.  It’s different nowadays: you access the building through a grimy steam-tunnel bored into its basement and the doors above the pale granite steps are permanently locked – the steps were problematic for half the year even in those days when the doors were open: it was hard to keep the steps free of snow and ice.    

Emma Poniatkowski worked as a typist and filing clerk on the eighth floor of an old skyscraper in the south Loop.  The museum was eight blocks away and it was free to city residents with ID on Thursdays.  The men, and some of the girls from the insurance agency where she was employed, took the afternoon off to ride the Cubbie express up to Wrigley Field for the first game of a double-header.  Someone hung a jocular sign on the door to the agency.  It was a fine sunny day, not too warm and perfect for baseball, but Emma wasn’t much of a sports fan.  After lunch, she walked to the museum and climbed the steps.  The lake glittered in the bright light and the glass towers on the Navy Pier shone like diamonds.

She climbed above the atrium to the second floor and hurried through the corridor, passing bronze statues of tribal people, noses and nipples shiny where museum-goers had touched them for good luck.  In a corner of the building, a small gallery displayed ancient Chinese jades.  The polished stones gleamed against dark velvet lining small alcoves in the dim room.  The only light in the gallery came from the jades, most of which were moss-green, although some were pale as alabaster and others reddish, veined with milk-colored stone that glistened like bacon-fat.  Each display case was like an aquarium in which an exotic gleaming fish carved from stone hovered in darkness.  Some of the jades were shaped like dragons with flat noses or dog-shaped muzzles; others were irregular, eccentrically shaped like bright roots torn from the ground, washed, and, then, polished into faceted surfaces.  Emma admired the color in the artifacts, the subtle morning-fresh green haze illumining some of the objects and the moss-color that reminded her of the very bottom of a shadowy and dense forest.    

Gliding from display case to case, Emma saw that something strange was happening.  Apparently, a walkway provided access to the rear of the display cases.  (Emma hadn’t noticed any door leading behind the wall, but, of course, the museum’s curators would have taken care to conceal that entrance, no doubt locked from inside.)  As she peered into one of the glass cases, she saw a pair of hands reach through the velvet against which the jade was displayed.  The hands looked yellowish and withered in the track-lighting aimed at the jade gemstones.  It wasn’t clear to Emma how the hands had penetrated the dark blue velvet lining of the case, but the fingers were visible, moving with deliberate intent.  For a moment, the hands hovered over the jade, crouched like spiders, and, then, reached down to seize the polished stone and lift it carefully away from its mount, a couple of brackets like staples piercing the velvet under the object.  The hands held the jade for a moment so that light coruscated on the amulet.  Then, the fingers holding the jade artifact vanished behind the velvet in the display case.

The curator invisible behind the wall moved parallel to Emma, passing from case to case, and, in each display, reaching through the velvet to remove the jade.  Perhaps, the objects were being conserved in some way or dusted or polished, even though all of them seemed mirror-bright and scintillant.  It was a strange thing to see and Emma wondered whether she shouldn’t inform the guard, a fat Black woman who was slumbering upright on a wooden stool in the corner of the gallery.  The guard was sleeping contentedly and Emma understood that whomever was removing the jades from their display cases undoubtedly had authorized access to them, working from the hidden corridor that ran along the perimeter of the gallery and so she didn’t trouble the fat lady.  It was a curious sight, however, to see the yellowish withered fingers with long hooked nails the color of ancient papyrus systematically removing the precious jades from their display cases.

After leaving the jade gallery, Emma walked over to see the Tibetan deities fiercely gesticulating within their glass boxes.  The gods and goddesses had enraged eyes and many arms and their garments were the color of freshly spilled blood.  Someone had made a cup from a skull and carved a flute from a skeleton’s femur.  She looked at the towering grass and wooden masks worn by New Guinea and Solomon Island witch-doctors – the pointed heads dangled tresses of raffia vine down over the carved mounts used to hoist the masks onto the shoulders of the dancers.  Emma walked through dark galleries full of bright stuffed birds and ended in a long hallway with soaring totem poles at both of its ends.  Her purse felt very heavy and the strap gouged into her shoulder.  She didn’t recall placing a couple of cans of Coca-Cola in her purse to drink later in the afternoon, but supposed that this was the explanation for the burden that she was now carrying.  The museum exhausted her and, so, she went outside and sat on the steps overlooking the lake.  A sailboat explored the horizon.  One of the Caryatids supporting a marble pier next to the great apron of stone steps seemed to wink at her.  

Emma opened her purse to remove one of the cans of soda pop.  There was no Coca-Cola.  Her purse was heavy because it was crammed full of jade artifacts.  She looked away, gazing out over the blue water to the towers across the bay.  When she looked back into her purse, she saw the moss-green jade glinting at her.  Emma quickly zipped her bag shut.  She stood up and hurried down the steps, almost tripping in her haste.  Then, she walked to the El and took the train to the apartment where she lived.  By the time, she reached her room, Emma was very thirsty.  She took the jade from her purse, wrapped the cool, smooth artifacts in several towels, and, then, hid the gemstones under her bed.  She found a beer in her refrigerator and sat on the fire-escape drinking it.     

2. 

Emma’s great-aunt had grown up before the war in the old country.  Once, she had been very wealthy, the heiress to a number of factories expropriated by the Germans during the war and, then, nationalized by the Communists afterward.  The old woman lived alone with her cat above the steam baths on Kedzie and drank vodka every day.  The nuns at Queen of Heaven paid her to work as a char-woman in their school.   

Children at the parochial school were encouraged to contribute pennies and dimes to fund the construction of a monument to Copernicus planned for a traffic circle at the Adler Planetarium.  Wealthy members of the community were invited to a grand ball from which the bulk of the money required for the monument was to be raised.  In recognition of her importance in the old country, Emma’s great-aunt had been given a ticket to the Copernican Ball.  

Of course, the old woman was in no condition to attend such a grand affair.  But she urged Emma to use her ticket.  From the ruins of her life in Poznan, she had salvaged several dresses sufficiently fine for the occasion.  Emma had green eyes and so her great aunt urged her to wear a silk gown of that color.  The dress fit the girl perfectly and, with her hair piled up on her head in a French braid, Emma was very beautiful.  The dress smelled slightly of moth-balls but Emma’s perfume concealed that scent.  The old woman had kept the gown in a cardboard box in her closet, bedded in vanilla-colored tissue paper.

One of Emma’s girlfriends, Elzbieta, went with her to the ball.  They parked near the hotel and, as they hurried over the sidewalk, men hooted and whistled at her.  In her purse, Emma carried a jade brooch from the museum.  The jade was bright green and polished to a fine sheen, carved into a pierced amulet depicting humming birds and small pears.  Emma knew that the jade necklace would either bring her great good luck or terrible calamity.  At the Palmer House, she went into the ladies’ room and put the brooch around her throat.  The jade was cold as ice between her breasts.

The night was memorable.  After the buffet, musicians picked from the symphony orchestra played waltzes and mazurkas.  Elzbieta said that the butcher-boy from Queen of Heaven had been staring all evening at her.  The butcher-boy was a dozen years older than Emma but had gone to the same school.  He had worked with his father cutting meat for a few years, but, then, gone into business on his own and was reputed to be very successful. The butcher-boy wore a tuxedo with a red sash.  

Elzbieta whispered to Emma that the butcher-boy was coming toward her, apparently with the intent of asking her to dance.  Emma modestly lowered her eyes, gazing down at the brilliant green stone glistening on her breast.

3.

Emma took her coffee on the terrace overlooking the lake.  Breeze stirred in the shaggy gingko tree beside the patio and the jade wind-chime under the eaves sounded.  Across the blue bay, Emma saw the green copper dome of the observatory rising over the trees on the hillside.  A speedboat cut a white trench in the water.  Farther out, sail boats dallied, waiting for the wind.  

After the death of her husband, Emma didn’t spend much time at the townhouse in the city.  She preferred the manor on Williams Bay.  The Haitian girl came and took her away Emma’s empty coffee cup and plate.  The sun was high over the lake and warmed her face and throat and hands.

She went inside and read a book until her eyes tired.  Then, Emma walked in the garden among the rose bushes.  After eating some toast with jam for lunch, Emma answered emails and looked at photographs of her great grand-children.  The flag in the garden seemed crooked to her and so she asked the gardener to adjust it.

When it was evening, Emma ate and, then, went into the closet in the bedroom where a small safe contained her jades.  She took out the tray where the green-stones were resting and set the carved medallions on her desk.  Emma could no longer recall which brooch she had worn on the night that she met her husband at the Copernican Ball.  The stones were cool and smooth under her fingers.  Jade didn’t age; the finely carved stones hadn’t altered in a thousand years.  But the skin on Emma’s fingers was now like crepe, yellow as parchment.  She held each stone, her long hooked fingernails clicking on the gems.  Someone had told her that jade desires to be touched daily.  If it is locked away, the stone becomes sad and whitens to the color of bone.  

Jade repelled death and decay.  Emma thought it would be a fine thing to be buried with the jade covering her chest and face, but, of course, this would be impractical and the bliss-bestowing gemstones should be passed on to others to work their magic for them.  

As the sun was setting, Emma went onto the terrace overlooking the bay.  In the green shadows, someone was singing a song in a foreign language.  The blue of the sky deepened and, then, the observatory dome across the water slid open.  Against the darkening sky, the copper observatory dome was moss-green, but the light inside the observatory spilled out into the darkness, gold, the color of honey.