Issue 6: Fall 2018

Creative Nonfiction

Lead You On

Clara Roberts

When I tried to kill myself, I thought it would stop the pain of being a drug addict. I imagined an immediate escape from the constant cravings and the deluge of sickness.

 I am not keeping up with life anymore because it's moving too fast and I am left behind. I brush the hair back from my hazel eyes and still cannot see clearly. The disquiet from a recent fight with my parents this frigid January evening follows me in every room of my family's house, enclosing me in my luminescent purple bedroom. My parents talk about taking my car away and I snap because that means I cannot drive to my drug dealer anymore; meth already swallowed me whole this year---a humiliating and depraved habit being the one part of life I live for. The weight of this night makes my sensitive eyes flutter and close.  My mom slips out of my bedroom---out of Dodge to her dim room where she dials 911 and yells into her old landline telephone: "We need an ambulance! My twenty-four year old daughter tried to kill herself."

Before going downstairs to wait until the paramedics arrive, she returns back to the double bed I am lying on. Her face looks strained and eyes unfocused.

"I'm so sorry, love. I've never been able to give you a solution for the hole in your heart," she says to me while attempting not to cry; she almost never cries.

"Mom, I'm sorry. I failed you. Maybe it's best for me to go away," I reply with a shaky whisper. I even feel like apologizing for not being able to talk louder.

But my mom does not hear my apology because she runs down the stairs to answer the front door that the paramedics keep ringing. I remain lifeless like a mangled animal, my left arm dangling off the edge of my bed and my eyesight marred from not having my glasses on and not allowing my eyes to look away from the bright ceiling lights. I hear multiple footsteps this time approaching my room; my heart sinks when the two paramedics walk into my room because I do not want them to see the Gwen Stefani purse replete with illicit drugs and used syringes on the floor by my dresser.

"She's a drug addict," my mom says.

The paramedics look at her with indifference and say nothing.

At this point in time, the overdose of the anti-psychotic medication, Zyprexa, I ingested only fifteen minutes earlier begins to control my body by tainting my perception of reality with more fog. I am still semi-cognizant of my surroundings and long for the next pleasurable shot of meth from the Gwen Stefani purse. My room looks brighter and blurrier than usual. I do not remember being carried out of the house.

In the ambulance, I am aware I'm going to the hospital to get the Zyprexa pills out of my body.  A middle-aged and undernourished orderly has an IV in front of me and with disgrace I pull up the sleeve to my left arm. He attempts to connect to a vein many times.

"You're all scar tissue," he says in a soft voice. He makes steady eye contact with me and in that moment I wonder if he always smells like isopropyl alcohol. I pull up the sleeve to my right arm this time and point to an area where he might be able to get on.  At last, he is able to attach the needle to one of my small veins right as we make the brief drive to Union Memorial, the nearest hospital to my house. I scrutinize the plump IV bag next to me and the tiny drops that are dripping into the dehydrated veins on my arm.  My body is channeled onto a sturdy stretcher and I cannot get the smell of sulfur and chemicals out of my presently numb nose. I cling to the crisp white sheets because I am too scared to be touched by any paramedic. We arrive at the hospital entrance while the paramedic checks my vitals and produces a tempered smile---as though a smile will make the madness stop. The siren stops and I realize I never noticed it was on.

"Where am I being taken?" I ask without making eye contact with anybody transporting me. I think I already know the answer, but I want to hear the news from them.

"The sixth floor of Union Memorial---the psych ward. We've got to get these pills out of you first, though, and then you're going to psych," the paramedic says.

I am tearing up because this selfish attempt did not take away all of the emotional clutter burying my mind. I go through life, pass its various gates and detours, and erase it at the same time. I am used to ruining things. I'm used to feeling numb because drugs make a person travel through the foggy valley of memories with caution and doubt. There's now a broken melody to life as I sleep on a thin mattress in a dark empty room of the ER waiting to be wheeled up to a ward where I'm not the only one who is a shadow of her former self.

Clara Roberts is a graduate of the MA in Writing Program at Johns Hopkins University. Her literary nonfiction work and poetry has been published in Adelaide Literary Magazine, From Whispers to Roars, and Trampset. She lives in Baltimore where she finds material every day to write about in her journal.

Take Me Home

Phil Rice

In the winter of 1986 I was a 25-year-old hotel credit manager living in Nashville, Tennessee. My father, Charles, was an Episcopal priest then serving as the rector at Trinity Episcopal Church in Gatlinburg, a resort town located in the Smoky Mountains. While our relationship had natural imperfections, he was my hero and closest friend; I adored him. A highly-educated theologian and a skilled preacher, Dad moved through the world with compassion and confidence. He wasn’t loud and boisterous, but when he entered a room people knew it. He was a natural leader with the ability to bear great weight on his shoulders. By the 1980s he was a highly respected senior clergyman among his colleagues in the Diocese of Tennessee and throughout the South. In addition, he had recently begun to establish himself as a literary figure in the secular world. An eccentric character and utterly devoted priest, he was admired by many and resented by some. That was my dad.

He also was known to keep a glass of Heaven Hill bourbon mixed with tap water by his side every evening, and he usually had a Kent cigarette burning. By the time I reached my early teens, it occurred to me that he was probably an alcoholic, but I have no horror stories of a drunk father rampaging through the house or the lives of others. In fact, he was rarely noticeably drunk, at least in my presence. But he did drink every day without exception, and over the years his alcohol intake steadily increased. That, combined with his smoking, his lack of exercise, his high stress job, and his unchecked diet (my mom was an excellent Southern cook) caused him to physically age at a rapid pace.

By the time he turned 56 he was a middle-aged man spreading ancient wisdom from a worn-out body. He set his eyes on an early retirement that would allow him to devote his senior years to writing and teaching. To this end, in the autumn of 1985, his wife Joann—my mother—rented an apartment in Nashville on a reconnaissance mission for employment and real estate. Thus was the situation in February, 1986, when my wife Pati, my one-year-old daughter Christi, my mom, and I made the drive from Nashville to Gatlinburg to visit Dad for a weekend. Upon arriving at Dad’s house, a family friend was waiting for us with news. Earlier that day Dad had suffered a heart attack; he had called 911 from his bed.

When we arrived at the hospital in nearby Sevierville that night, Dad was already situated in a regular hospital room. The next day a series of tests revealed, among other concerns, a mass near his stomach and severe liver dysfunction. The speculation was that the heart attack had actually been precipitated by pressure caused by the failing liver. Surgery was scheduled for later in the week to remove the mass and generally explore the region. There were figures and data provided to verify all this, but his physical appearance was all the evidence I needed. Something was very wrong.

The day after the test results, Dad and I were alone in his hospital room. He was standing in front of the window looking toward a horizon dominated by the magnificent Smokies, his hands on his hips in a familiar pose. I was sitting in a chair by the window. We had been discussing the logistics of his situation, but when he went silent I followed suit. The silence was deep but not uncomfortable. He never shifted his eyes from the view of the mountains. I sat motionless, waiting for words I knew were coming.

After an indeterminable length of time he spoke, still not averting his gaze. “Son … I’m going to ask you a question … I’m only going to ask you once … I will accept your answer and never mention it again.”

I shifted to the edge of my seat, leaning in to make sure I heard every word clearly. “Alright Dad …”

After a brief pause he said it. “Take me home.”

The three words slammed into me. At first all I could do was stammer. If this were a directive, I would have responded without hesitation. But this was a request, not an order. He could have asked his wife of thirty-five years; he could have asked any number of powerful people in the community who would have done anything for him; he could have asked one of many close friends to come and fulfill his simple request. But he was asking me. My mind raced to process the possibilities. Mom would be against it, but she was intensely loyal and if our call was to go home, she would outwardly support it. But what then?

So far there had been speculation but no official diagnosis. I knew it was serious, but I had no reason to see his health issues as being terminal. More accurately, I didn’t want to see them as being terminal. I wanted to do whatever I could to keep my dad with me—but I also wanted to support his wishes. Never in my young life had I been faced with such a dilemma.

Finally, after what felt like an eternity, I began to form words. “Dad … I can’t do that …” He continued to face forward, not once letting our eyes lock. He was listening and feeling for my response. Pragmatism and fear were guiding me. “If I take you home, you might have another heart attack … I don’t even know CPR … I …” Suddenly my words were done. The issue had been decided. I wasn’t able to fully see the question, and he knew it.

“Okay, son. I had to ask … I won’t ask again.” After a slight pause he turned to face me. “I guess they’ll be bringing the grub they call food in soon.” He had accepted the answer and moved on, but the question would haunt me for years.

A couple of days later a benign tumor was removed from Dad’s stomach. That was the good news; in the process the surgeon got an up-close look at the liver. Dad had cirrhosis, and the liver was done. There was now a tube extending from the surgical incision through which the bile that his liver could no longer process dripped into a bag. Two thoughts quietly crossed my mind when I first visited him after the operation: Taking Dad home would now be extremely difficult, and bile looks a lot like bourbon and water.

A week after the surgery, arrangements were made to fly Dad to Park View Hospital in Nashville where his friend Dr. Morse Kochtitzky was a chief administrator. He spent the next two weeks in a private room with quality care. Many of his closest friends were able to visit and say goodbye. There was talk of his possibly being able to receive home health care, but to what end I do not recall. The topic never developed beyond hope.

One afternoon Dr. Kochtitzky called us into a meeting room. In a compassionate but matter-of-fact manner, he said Dad was not going to leave the hospital alive. Within a day of that meeting, Dad began slipping into a coma. I remember one afternoon he was trying to tell me something. As best as I could make out, he was saying, “I’m sick son.” At first I thought he meant he was about to vomit, and I began looking for a receptacle. Frustrated, he shook his head and said again, more clearly, “I’m sick son.” He was simply telling me that he was dying. I leaned back against the window and looked into his eyes for a long, long time. His eyes showed fear and concern—for me. He knew I was losing my dad.

He spent his final two days comatose, breathing on his own but hooked to an oxygen machine. At one point a nurse started to enter the room while my brother Hal and I were standing by the door talking to Dad’s friend Arch. We politely asked what she was doing. She said she was going to give him an enema full of nutrients. No, you’re not, we said. We knew that, at best, such an action would only prolong the suffering. She started to get flustered and tried to say that it was not up to us. Hal and I were instantly unified and standing between her and Dad, but before we could say anything else, Arch spoke up. “Leave my buddy alone.” His voice was cracking with emotion, but he left no room for debate. The nurse exited.

Soon she was strolling down the hall toward us with Dr. Kochtitzky in tow. He was a massive man and carried himself with both authority and dignity. The three of us were prepared to stand our ground on this issue, just as we each knew Dad would do for us if the situation were reversed. Dr. Kochtitzky walked up and put his huge hand on my shoulder. “We’ve stopped the nutrients. She’s just going to check him for comfort.”

 For twenty-four more hours Dad was curled in the fetal position, motionless. Then he quietly died.

Since that day in 1986 I have had many opportunities to observe, and sometimes directly participate in, end-of-life situations. Each circumstance is unique unto itself, so there is no way to prepare a useable guidebook. The best we can do is share our experience and awareness in hope that when others find themselves facing such a moment they might be able to retain something useful.

Over time I have developed an awareness about life and death: they are a singular event for which love is the essence. All life is impermanent in its fabric, and the time in one’s vessel is best measured by quality over quantity. As Dad himself once wrote, "Whether with things, situations, animals or people our relationships are passing things—brief. Some are much briefer than others. The value, however, is not measurable in terms of duration, but in terms of depth. We are twice blessed when we are given both duration and depth—but we can insist on neither."

Recently I came across a medical report from February 3, 1986—two weeks before the heart attack that landed him in the hospital—buried among my father’s files and papers. The report provided details about an examination and various tests, and it included a recommendation “that the patient be hospitalized as soon as possible (today if possible) for diagnostic work up to determine the etiology of the jaundice, anemia and hematuria.” Dad declined, stating his work with the church prevented immediate hospitalization. No word of this examination was mentioned to my mother or to anyone in the family.      

Apart from an occasional flinch, I am able to look back on the afternoon when my dad asked me to take him home and feel confident that I made the best decision available. For whatever reasons, he never fully disclosed what he knew about his condition, and no terminal prognosis had yet been rendered. At 25 my intuition and sensory awareness were underdeveloped, and I had no experience with the concepts of home healthcare or hospice. My goal was to get my dad well so that he could continue being my dad forever. Intellectually I knew this was not possible, but I was determined to try. Fight it. Don’t give in to the illness.

Over the years my perceptions have been sharpened by blunt experience. In addition to the loss of family and friends along the way—a consequence of achieving middle age—I was the caregiver during my mother’s slow, six-year decline into vascular dementia and the various terminal illnesses that preceded her death at an assisted living facility in 2012. In the midst of that scenario I also took care of my fiance Janice during her sudden and rapid decline from glioblastoma multiforme, a stage IV cancer within the brain that was discovered exactly one month after our engagement. I stayed by her side for two months of hospitalization before bringing her home as my wife. We spent three weeks beautifully experiencing life together before her journey took her away from me in 2011. In both of these situations hospice played a vital and loving role, and in each I experienced the realities of the modern medical industry at an intensely personal level.

In this light, I would react differently to Dad’s request if it were presented today. I would gather my resources for hospice home care. Ideally the surgery would be skipped, thus allowing him to live out his days without a non-healing wound in his side and a tube connected to his liver, but if it took the findings of the surgery to fully understand the terminal nature of his condition, so be it. Either way, I would take him home. He would have been able to rest in comfortable surroundings, sip his bourbon, smoke his Kents, eat fried eggs and bacon for breakfast—whatever he felt like doing. There is a good chance that he would have still been able to say goodbye to all of the people who found their way to the hospital in Nashville. And whether the circumstances hastened his death or delayed it, he would have left the confines of his ravaged body surrounded by the loving energy of home.

Phrases such as “right to die” and “death with dignity” have increasingly become national topics of discussion, and they will continue to gain momentum as medical science discovers new ways for keeping the human body technically alive. This is a tricky and complex subject, particularly with regard to who gets to decide—and when. But what often gets overlooked in the discussion is that dying is a fact of life, and we all make decisions every day that contribute to the time, place, and cause of our death. The key, from my experience and subsequent awareness, is to not only accept the inevitability of death but to embrace death as being profoundly natural. With this perception the end of life can potentially be as beautiful and celebratory as the beginning of life. This is in no way meant to suggest that death will ever be easy or painless for those left to deal with the loss. Far from it. Grief and fear, which are our two biggest obstacles to the acceptance of death, are powerful and real. And so is love, and that’s the ultimate point.

I respect and listen to medical professionals, but I no longer assume they have the final word. Doctors are professional consultants and skilled technicians—not ultimate authorities. In those moments when we are confronted with decisions regarding end-of-life choices for a loved one, the essence of the question is, “what is the most loving act?” And the question concerns the person facing the transition. Forcing someone to endure the torture of endless medical treatment because we cannot summon the insight and courage to say goodbye is a quest of self-preservation rather than an act of compassion. To be sure, there are times when the answer is more obvious than others, and such moments are never easily navigated. There are no pre-existing mathematical formulas; we simply have to let love take the lead.

In my present view, my dad’s “take me home” request is an expression of true acceptance. His choosing to be home reflects the desire to move beyond this physical plane surrounded by love rather than the machinery and round-the-clock prods of the medical world. But home is transportable. If necessary, home can even be fostered within the confines of a hospital room. All that is required is the awareness of love. Hold the love close and the love will take you home.

Phil Rice is a native Tennessean currently living in Woodstock, Illinois. His writing has appeared most recently in PBS's Next Avenue, The Raven's Perch, and Sport Literate. An editor for Canopic Publishing and The Ross House House Press, Phil is the author of Winter Sun: A Memoir of Love and Hospice.

Three Words in My Life

Rey Armenteros

I don’t have an occasion for every special word, but there are words that are tied to something in my past, like vernissage. I was part of a vernissage once. Before that fateful event in my life, I had never even heard of the word. This rare word contributes something to a small part of the art world. A vernissage is a private viewing of art before it is officially opened in an exhibition. Some collectors and patrons are invited to one of these things to maybe get a heads up on upcoming talent or to have first dibs on buying something.

My vernissage was for my MFA art exhibition. San Francisco was a perfect site for such an event. There was still a rich art aristocracy that was learned as well as passionate about art. They had their fingers in the city’s art interests, and this included our school because of the history behind it. The San Francisco Art Institute was the mecca for the art traditions of Northern California. Many of the mile markers of the area came through that school as teachers or students.

It was fateful to me not because I found success through the important people that skip the line by attending a special show but because I was now going out into the world to do something with my art, for better or for worse, like a debut. Every time I hear vernissage, I think of debutante, and then I think about me during this one moment when everything was right in front of me.

My cousin was visiting me in San Francisco once, and as we were catching up on old times, he was telling me that he was atrophying. I knew exactly what he meant, and it had happened to me too. If you stop working out, your muscles get smaller. We were discussing the finer points of maybe getting some of those muscles back (even though he was far too young to be worrying about such things). And now, every time I encounter that word, I go back to that moment when we were ambling around people on the Chinatown streets and talking on about shrinking muscles. It comes back to me through his mumbled words, the unresponsive look on his face. What I find funny is that was the exact word I used for that phenomenon, and I would use that one all the time. Now, I wonder if he was using it because I used to use it. Regardless if we can say it was my word or if he in fact acquired authorship over it through some other source, every time I think of muscles losing their mass, I go back to that word my cousin used, and in my mind, it is now his word.

Because I don’t have words for every situation, I get stuck when I try to move forward. I start guessing. Somebody might ask me a question, and I can stand exactly where I now am and piece something together with words as they come to me as I try to search for an answer. I am looking for the big words, and what I really want is that one word that would be a perfect response. These are the words that are supposed to be important, the ones that drop right in front of you to single-handedly solve a problem, and I can’t think of any right now. I can’t even think of a question grand enough that requires an important word to be dropped on an executive officer’s desk to impress this person with its very gravity.

But I like it when a word means nothing but something indirect to just two people. A word as an inside joke can spin a little laughter between friends. I used to use the word interesting for certain things but then resorted to fascinating when interest was not enough. It was a play by play thing, because most things were just interesting if they were not boring, but they would be fascinating if they really grabbed my attention. Well, that word’s primary role in my hierarchy of emphasis has developed an affliction because of this one time in Thailand.

Every time I think of fascinating, it now takes me back to a simpler time, when I was traveling with a good friend I have always held in high regard. There was no agenda, and there was nothing profound to describe. We were drinking on a rooftop in Bangkok and hanging out with his roommate from Estonia, and my friend was pursing his lips like a pondering scientist and lisping the word, “fascinating!” for almost everything I said. At first, it was annoying, but then it became hilarious, and I was soon going along with his goofiness because it was the first burst of life I had had in a long time. I was saying fascinating with that lisping facial expression alongside him, and we continued using it when we left Bangkok and traveled into the countryside, finding everything fascinating. And I didn’t stop using it when I left that country but used it in other situations where the people around me had no reference to the history behind our word, when my friend was already long gone. That was the circumstance that disarmed that superlative expression and made it into a place marker for infectious laughter, and ever since that day, fascinating could no longer be greater than interesting, and I have never used it that way again.

Rey Armenteros is a Los Angeles-based painter and writer who writes the blog, Through Concentrated Breath. He has pieces forthcoming in Magnolia Review, Umbrella Factory Magazine, and Still Point Arts Quarterly.

Will, Bill, and Rupert

Reg Darling

Part I:

Though William Gifford Deshner died in 1943, six years before I was born, his charismatic presence echoed through our family’s stories so vividly that he seemed as tangibly active in my childhood world as a living person. He was my great-grandfather. His daughter, Wilda, and her husband, Rollin David Wilson (aka Baldy) were my mother’s parents.

The stories told about Will Deshner were abundant, earthy, ordinary, and reverent. He was a skilled carpenter, worked extraordinarily hard, and was loved equally by the pious and wild branches of the family. He was devotedly active in his community’s Free Methodist church, but he also enjoyed sampling Baldy’s prohibition-era homebrew. He took long solitary walks in the woods, sometimes even in thunderstorms. He had a grade school education. The family stories mostly centered around his distinctive blend of humor and wisdom—like the time he told his grandson, Bill, when they were shingling the roof on a tall building, “If you drop your hammer, make sure you let go of it.”

I first encountered Will Deshner’s journal in 1968. Aunt Gert (Will Deshner’s eldest grandchild) and her husband, Ed, had moved back to Mayburg, Pennsylvania, the long defunct village of their birth and youth, after maintaining one of the remaining original houses there as a camp and family gathering place for many years. I was a student at Clarion State College (now Clarion University) fifty miles away. This was a strange and difficult time in my life, during which I often sought respite and healing in the familiar woods of my youth and ancestors. Gert and Ed offered an always available refuge in the form of a spare room, a seat at the dinner table, and a back door that opened onto miles of loved and familiar forest. On one of my weekend visits, Gert showed me a volume of my great-grandfather’s journal. I was immediately interested because I had recently begun keeping a journal of my own, and Will Deshner’s recurring mentions of my favorite forest places bespoke a kinship deeper than mere ancestry.

Volumes of the journal circulated among my mother’s siblings, and I was always eager for an opportunity to peruse one, but it wasn’t until many years later that I was able to borrow a volume from Gert’s daughter, Judy, and read it from beginning to end. In it, I found more questions than answers, more mystery than knowledge and I became hungry for more. Meanwhile, Uncle Dick (Richard Wilson) had gathered all the other known volumes because he believed they should be kept together.

Dick and I weren’t close when I was growing up, but as an adult, I felt an easy natural rapport with him, and the e-mail dialogue (Dick had moved to Florida in retirement.) that arose from my questions about the journal often rambled in other directions. After several years of correspondence, Dick gave me all the journal volumes in his possession. He said trusted me to do the right thing with them.

[One volume is missing in action.]

The journal consists of one line per day, written across both open pages of hardbound ledgers, from 1903 to 1942. In the beginning, it was only a record of work done and pay received, but Will Deshner gradually began adding information about weather and events outside the realm of his work. In part, he may have begun noting other things so that a blank day wouldn’t be misconstrued as an omission. The writing is very spare—events are stated, but not described. Though reading a few pages imparts an impression so mundane that one can’t help wondering what could have motivated him to persist through thirty-nine years of daily practice, the days accumulating into thousands bespeak an intensity far beyond his meager words. As one reads onward, an image of the man and his life, faded and cracked like an old, yellowed photograph, emerges.

[I find great hope in the rising of that faded image.]

I had the journal transcribed and then, after a several year struggle with reformatting, proofing, my highly variable motivation, and the competing demands of my own writing, published it via CreateSpace so it would be available to anyone (especially family) who was interested.

The original now resides in the collection of the Warren County Historical Society.

[Like Dick, I hadn’t taken ownership of the journal; I had taken responsibility for its fate.]

Part II

Baldy had driven the train from Mayburg to Sheffield when he learned that Wilda was in labor with their second child. He decided to make the return trip, even though there was an ice jam in progress on the Tionesta Creek.

[The Tionesta Creek would be called a river anywhere else.]

He drove the locomotive as fast as he dared in the strange silver half-light of a New Year’s full moon. The rising ice was closing over the tracks in the visible distance behind him as he raced down the creekside. Baldy and Wilda’s eldest son was born that night. They named him William Deshner Wilson, after Wilda’s father; they called him “Bill.”

Uncle Bill became my primary source of clarification for the assorted gem-like mysteries I found scattered through my great grandfather’s journal.

[I needed more than answered questions; I needed stories.]

Bill savored storytelling at a gentle, leisurely pace, and listening to his stories was a fine way to spend an afternoon.

Bill once said about his grandfather, “He wasn’t just a good man—there are lots of those— he was a great man, and those are scarce.”

Part III:

From Will Deshner’s journal:

March, 1929

17        S          O.E. Rupert was Drounded to Day                             30  Clear  6     S

18        10        Reparing Generator on large engin                            39  Clear  13   10

19        4          Reparing acid still Down to Kellittville hunting Rupert             4

20        10        Reparing crude acid column                                                               10

21                    hunting Rupert at Porter farm

22        10        Reparing finishing column                                         Rain and warm  10

23        10        Reparing acid column                                                                         10

24        S          Down to bucksmills hunting Rupert                                                   S

Bill told me the backstory: O.E. Rupert was a rarity in the waning timber boom of the Tionesta boondocks—a (relatively) cultured man. He lived with his brother in Truemans near the confluence of Fool’s Creek and the Tionesta, a few miles upstream from Mayburg. He regularly crossed the creek on a swinging footbridge and followed the railroad grade downstream to Mayburg, where he gave music lessons in the homes of his pupils. The last lessons of the day were reserved for Mayburg’s Italian enclave, where the residents bartered homemade beer and wine for his services. After one well-paid evening of violin lessons, he failed to negotiate the swinging bridge.

Part IV:

Once, during my hippie wanderings of the early seventies, when I was broke and burdened by aching tenderness for a lost love, a friend repaid a small, forgotten loan from long before. I decided to put a large quantity of good food in my belly. I chose a particular restaurant partly because I was unlikely to encounter a familiar face there. I preferred not to be distracted from my fine blend of melancholy, existential anguish, and self-pity.

I ordered a ham steak because it was one of the biggest meals I could get with my meager windfall, and seeing it on the menu evoked memories from a younger, happier time, when I was camping with Uncle Bill, in the old Mayburg Park. We had fished all day and as we relaxed into mellow exhaustion, Bill put a ham steak on the grill. We ate with the natural gusto of well earned hunger, and Bill told hunting, fishing, Mayburg, and Baldy stories until the delicious fatigue that comes after a long day well spent outdoors overtook us. It was one of the most idyllic, contented evenings of my life.

The memory lifted me. I basked in the remembered warmth of fishing, sunshine, and campfire and as I settled into the sensual pleasures of eating, my funk dissipated like morning fog on a sunny day.

Many years later, I told Bill that story. He grinned and said, “That’s the way it’s supposed to work isn’t it.”

Part V:

In the spring of 2012, Bill was hospitalized after injuring his shoulder in a fall.

While I was visiting him, a social worker came to explain to Bill that he would have to be transferred to a nursing home for an indefinite period of “transitional care” with the goal of enabling him to return home to Sheffield and his nearly blind wife.

[Bill had a large and understandable, if only partially rational, loathing for nursing homes—at age ninety-one he had seen too many loved ones vanish into them never to be seen again. The nursing home they wanted to send him to was the same one Gert had died in the previous year.]

The social worker’s body language was radiant with dissonance. The “goal” was a motivational ploy i.e. bullshit. Bill knew it. I knew it. He didn’t say that he knew it, and I went along with it, because if I cooked up a ruse, spirited him out of there, and took him to Bobbs Creek (his favorite trout stream) to die, I would get in serious trouble of several kinds.

[There was something hard as flint in Bill’s eyes.]

After the social worker left, Bill tried to get out of bed. I talked him out of it and distracted him with questions about Will Deshner’s journal. Remembrance raised his spirits. He said there was a story he had intended to tell me since I had asked him about O.E. Rupert’s drowning, but had forgotten on earlier occasions.

One summer, when the circus came to Sheffield, two elephants escaped during the night. They found their way to the Tionesta Creek and followed it. Meanwhile, the Rupert brothers had been on a serious bender. They awoke one morning befogged and befuddled by the hangover haze of moonshine, staggered out onto their porch overlooking the Tionesta Creek, and saw elephants frolicking in the water in joyful freedom. They summoned their neighbors to ask them if the spectacle was real.

Then he tried to get out of bed again. I asked him if he needed more pain medication and he said, “Yes.” The busy nurses didn’t respond to the buzzer. Bill started fumbling with his I.V. as if trying to figure out how to unhook it. I put my hands on his shoulders, looked into his eyes, and said, “Bill, if you fall now, you’re going to be in a world of shit, and I’m going to feel like it was my fault. Please don’t do this to me. I’ll go get a nurse and get you some more pain medication, but you have to promise me you won’t get out of bed while I do that.”

He looked away.

“Bill, look at me.”

Our eyes met.

“Do you promise you won’t get out of bed while I get the nurse?”

“Okay.”

Bill kept his promise. The nurse apologetically admitted Bill was long overdue for his pain medication and helped him move into a more comfortable position on the bed. The tension in his voice and eyes ebbed with the quickness of intravenous morphine, but so too did a visible measure of the gentle, but acute alertness that defined so much of Bill.

Assuming that Bill would tire easily, I had intended my visit to be brief, but now I was afraid that as soon as I left, he would try to get out of bed again, and the distraction of my company seemed comforting. Judy arrived as Bill’s lunch was brought in and she assisted him with her perfect, inimitable blend of authority and kindness. Shortly after lunch, a volunteer from hospice came to sit with Bill. We said our goodbyes, and I promised to visit again the next day.

A few hours later, Bill was transported to the nursing home by ambulance and died while his daughter, Linda, was completing the admission papers. He made his getaway, after all.

At Bill’s funeral in Sheffield, a group of local veterans performed a military ceremony with such stilted awkwardness that it was embarrassing and pathetic, even though their reverence was real and touching. The twenty-one-gun salute outside seemed harshly inappropriate for a man of Bill’s extraordinary gentleness.

[Bill served in the Navy during World War Two and saw heavy action in the South Pacific. He never talked about it.]

Then the preacher quoted scriptures until I was ready to drop to my knees and beg for mercy. His hour of alternations between scriptural passages and prayers was wearisome in ways he was incapable of perceiving. He was relatively young and innocently kind, but he seemed smarter than his words, and that was weirdly poignant in a situation that already had a surplus of poignancy.

[A seven-inch brook trout is the greatest miracle one should ever need.]

I began to rant in my head about the way the minister’s professed humility veiled an arrogance utterly at odds with Bill’s spirit, but then I remembered that so too was my irritation and impatience.

[If you drop your hammer, make sure you let go of it.]

Part VI:

I drove to Mayburg, intending to hike one of the routes I had gleaned from Will Deshner’s journal. Though I had roamed the surrounding Allegheny National Forest for decades, I hadn’t visited Mayburg itself in several years. I parked my truck at Gert and Ed’s former residence, now a camp owned by their grandson. On the way in, I saw that all the old, communal shortcuts had been closed off with gates and “No Trespassing” signs— the walking route to the long abandoned railroad grade that follows the Tionesta Creek was easily twice its former distance.

[Times had changed and little trickles of urban toxicity had leaked into the boondocks.]

I set out on my own alternative route through the woods intending to cross Kingsley Run, a small tributary of the Tionesta, a short distance upstream from Mayburg, traverse the ridge to the east into the lower end of Frozen Eddy Run, and pick up on my originally intended route at Frozen Eddy’s confluence with the Tionesta. Once again, my route was blocked by posted property lines, so I had to hike much farther upstream to the remains of the old dam that once held Mayburg’s water supply. The inconvenience was well compensated. Though the dam hadn’t held water in my lifetime, it still held a flood of memories—fishing alone and with Gert and my grandfather, a stoned sunlit afternoon making love with my first true love, a summer of 1969 marijuana patch eaten by deer. Sunlight, birdsong, and cobalt sky gently, but firmly, pulled me back into the here and now.

I climbed the ridge, crossed over into the headwaters of Frozen Eddy, climbed again to the ridgetop between Frozen Eddy and Phelps Run, and followed it northward to a clearing that yields a broad, breathtaking view of the Tionesta Valley.

[Frozen Eddy Run and Phelps Run are the first and second Tionesta Creek tributaries upstream from Mayburg.]

My original plan had evaporated—I was wandering now, letting the land lead me into its shapes and wonders.

[A pile of bear shit at the edge of the clearing, reminded me that wildness still lived there.]

The easiest descent into Phelps Run was an oblique angle back south and slightly east, to the headwaters, where the main branch breaks up into several small spring seeps. It’s a beautiful, steep-sided little valley, and its spaciousness in early spring, before the trees fully leaf out, is so lovely that it’s both lonely and joyous.

I followed the stream to its confluence with the Tionesta and followed the old railroad grade that parallels the creek back toward Mayburg. At the mouth of Frozen Eddy, I felt a fleeting urge to climb the ridge again and search for the beech tree bearing my great-grandfather’s carved initials that I found the same year the deer ate my Kingsley Run marijuana patch, but tired feet and an empty canteen spoke more forcefully than nostalgia.

When I returned a few weeks later, I found where the old beech tree had stood, fallen, and returned to the soil to nourish the thicket of saplings that had grown from its seeds.

Reg Darling lives in Arlington, Vermont with his wife, Theresa and two cats. When he isn’t writing or painting, he wanders in the woods. His essays have appeared in The Chaos Journal, The Dr. T.J. Eckleburg Review, Remembered Arts Journal, River Teeth Journal, Sky Island Journal, Tiferet Journal, Timberline Review, Whitefish Review, and others.

Lost

Sheree Stewart Combs

I lost our baby on February 6, 1986, six weeks into a long awaited pregnancy after years of infertility treatment.

I felt pregnant. There was a difference in my face in the mirror, a new knowing in my eyes. My nipples were larger and much darker sensing the need to prepare to nurture. Having charted my basal body temperature every morning for three and one-half years and having gone through three surgeries, and fourteen months of painful inseminations, I knew my body.

My husband and I had just allowed ourselves to feel a little excitement when the pain set in. A strange, dull pain, down low, an odd pressure. An unfamiliar fullness that made me feel I should burp. But burping did not help.

I called the doctor.

Before sunrise we were winding our way through Bluegrass farmland on our way to the hospital with my head pressed against the dashboard as I vomited bile into the floorboard. The pain and pressure had gotten much worse.

My husband let me out at the emergency entrance and helped me inside to a chair, bent double in pain by now. A kind lady came to sit with me while he went to park the truck. She could tell that something was very wrong. I will never forget the sad concern that filled her eyes.

Emergency staff came to get me. Dr. James showed up and ordered an ultrasound. The intern inserted a catheter to fill my bladder with liquid. Then we made the trip down the hall to the ultrasound room. The doctor’s statement “See, there in her abdomen” told us everything we did not want to know.

The baby had attached inside my Fallopian tube and as it grew the tube had ruptured, filling my pelvis with blood. Our baby was forever lost.

Then came the sudden shift as the emergency became life-threatening.

As they prepared me for surgery I looked down to see the catheter still inserted in my full bladder and turned to the weary intern “You’ll take care of that won’t you?” Then phone calls were made to my mother and my best friend. “Please pray for me” I cried. Seeing my husband in tears, I thought “Donnie never cries”. He looked like a small lost boy. Tears made salty tracks down my face, across my lips and onto my hospital gown as the operating room door closed, cutting us off from each other.

Leaving him all alone.

Everything seemed to be happening in weird slow motion but yet too fast. I wanted to hold onto my baby a little longer even if on one level I knew his or her life was already gone.

I came to in a hospital bed, IV’s in my arms, my husband in a chair by me, family coming in and out of the room unsure of what to say. I was too groggy to talk.

I did not want to talk.

There were no words.

I awoke throughout the night to look at my husband watching over me from a chair by my bed. I saw the scared in him. He was afraid he would lose me along with our baby. “She lost a lot of blood” a distant, disembodied voice said. Nurses came to give me pain shots and change the IV’s.

My husband stayed resolutely by my bed. Sometimes I seemed to be floating but then I would look down to see him and become anchored once more to the bed and to him.

By morning I was not as groggy but in pain, mostly in the heart, although I had been cut all the way across the abdomen. The incision followed the same thin scar left from surgery I had elected to have three years earlier to give me a chance to conceive. A scar that carried so much hope now turned into an emblem of sorrow.

My mother called while my husband had stepped out of the room and I sobbed out the words “I’m never going to have a baby” for the very first time. I threw them out into the universe and the magnitude of them stilled my heart.

I lay there in awe of those words. I tried to take them back but they quickly moved out of reach and floated out of the hospital room window to spread across the gray sky like a covey of doves, their dark wings flashing.

I could not take them back and I knew somewhere deep in my heart that the words were true. They would become my new truth.

As I watched them fly beyond the horizon something irreparable tore loose in my heart.

And I knew at age thirty that the grief of losing this baby, and the others I had seen in my husband’s eyes before we wed, would be a sorrow we would not be able to outrun in this lifetime.

Not even in two lifetimes.

This grief would ebb and flow with a life all its own like the blood that filled my pelvis as our baby’s life drained out into me.

This grief would become our life-long companion, sometimes in the distance, sometimes as close as a lover. Closer than our own skin.

Sheree Stewart Combs grew up in the Appalachian Mountains in Letcher County, Kentucky. She and her husband live in central Kentucky on a small farm, although Letcher County is still ‘home’ to her.  In 2015 Sheree retired from a long career in state government in the provision of social services to focus on writing. She holds a Masters Degree in Human Environmental Science (Family Studies) from the University of Kentucky. Sheree is proud of her Appalachian roots and the hardworking people who came before her.  She often draws on her childhood experiences and the life of her grandparents, Obie and Hettie Stewart, for inspiration.  Sheree has more recently written of her struggles as a younger woman with infertility and the loss of a baby. She has honed her writing skills in classes at the Carnegie Center for Literacy and Learning and in a writing group that nurtures and supports her craft. When not writing, Sheree enjoys gardening, photography and the Argentine Tango, a dance community she and her husband have been a part of for the past twelve years. Daily walks on a country road inspire her as a writer as she communes with nature and the cows, horses and dogs along her route. And, she travels to the mountains as often as she can.