October 23, 2006

•    Dear Bubba,
                  Well, the old man, really the kingpin of what I have been doing with the papers here, after all the tomfoolery is over and done, and there has been tomfoolery about it, is dead.   We have been waiting three days for him to wake up, with plenty of food and drink and the like and he has not gotten it sufficiently in his head to return to us.  There has been music, but no funeral since Allie hates them.  The old man himself requested that we have no funeral so Allie would not be peeved.  Scotland Yard was called in at last.  They said it was like a Scot to think of them and the wee bit they're given for proper fertilizer.  Their spokesman was a Scot himself.
        Kendrick was sleeping in the library with him when he died, though he did not note the time.  It seemed the best room that we had for the wake, and so we had in there.  He had eaten a good meal and taken a fair draught of ale before he died.  I asked him which of the poems Mr. Marshall brought back, he liked the best and he mentioned the one about the jadecutters.  Alan and Herb and Gary and Lawrence and Coe came up to finish off what was left of the goods.  They carried him from the truck and saw him lowered then we all shovelled the rest of the bit of Scotland in.  He had a coffin of yew wood made by one of the Brummet boys who liked to work wood.  He had a Mathesson crest carved and nailed to it with fine nails.  We all thought this a very good poem:

   

  ------------------------------------------------

  RECTITUDE

  Set your eye upon the river of ch'i
  slowly winding the sun casts back from the
  disorderly bamboo
  Haphazard green grace are its leaves-
  so many the talents of our lord

  Shaping the jade, cutting,
  filing, grinding, we do not yeild our purpose,
  on guard against those who carve kalumny

  The voice of the heart of our lord
  makes visible our hearts, oh, ours is a prince
  firm and gifted.
  When he has given his word, he continues
  in its way
                           
          I'd sure be pleased to see you if you come out this way,
                                  Dan
                                    

  Dear Mama and Rachie,
            
           Our dear Mariah has passed beyond the veil.  Lizzie thinks it was to stick up for Donald.  He certainly has been a good friend to us for many, many years and deserves a better lawyer than some would give him.  Vie and Lizzie have taken her down to Reno, packed in dry ice.  The Yosemite doctor signed the death certificate and wrote a very good letter so they would not hold her over too long.  Then they will go with her by train out east to Provo.  Willie and Josie want to have the funeral there.  Kevin would have been a good son to her and would want it remembered that he had done it.  Mariah was both aunt and mother to him and he loved her.  Now he thinks it just as well that she be remembered as Sampson's wife.  I will be remembered as Peg and Lymon's son.  Only the old now remember that Peg was Sampson's first wife or that Emily was Sampson's daughter. 
          Lizzie does not know quite what to do.  She wants to go to the funeral, but also wants to spend some time with the Yard of Scotland, her Donald being so newly gone.  If it were Kendrick, she would already be home having thrown herself on his grave and sobbing.  This is not her first husband and we are not in Morrocco where people are more at liberty to display their feelings.
              The swelling had not gone down on her leg as much as was advertised.  Either that or it had grown during our westward trip.  I thought so and had called Willie about it.  Willie had called Vi, not wanting to disturb Lizzie.  Vi decided to tell Donald who was almost too far in drink to know what she was saying.  That is why he took the pineapple juice in the morning, hoping to survive until Lizzie returned.  He had had three heart attacks before he had decided on the old Scotch remedy for the negligence of the angel of death.  Kenny did his best afterwords, but Donald just didn't last. 
         Lizzie says she has no real regrets.  Donald admired Dans' friends tremendously and thought they would be as important to poetry as the Hume/Pound/Elliot circle was in London.  I think he will be happy to have it remembered that he was put into the ground by them with Mavis, Kenny, Angelina, Emily, Sister Brummet, Fatima, and their prodgeny no one will have remembered it to be a small funeral.  They had up the pipes from the city and the old Scotts quaker to sing in his old, quavery voice.  He had too much to do with the clearances for my taste, but Donald said that he ought not to forget who he himself was.
        Mariah died at Glacier Point Hotel.  Mama, it is second only to heaven to lie in a bed there.  Mariah wanted to go to see them push the fire off the edge.  They have a firefall every night at Yosemite which looks like a beautiful waterfall of glowing orange with the stars all bright around it.  It must have joggled a clot loose that went to her lungs in the night.  We will miss her.  But she might have died in the car on the way home or in some tawdry little hospital with Vi and Lizzie arguing with the doctor about what should be done.  This way she went from one heaven into another.  I do not doubt that Donald will be the better for her promptness in following him.
          I know that there are some who will think Donald wrong for the way that he lived his life.  He saw only the horrors of the clearances and the wars.  If any new idea emerged, he hoped that it would bring a better world than the old one.  He was very dissappointed when the war started in Vietnam.  Kevin said that it will produce divisions among the Chinese which he hoped were beginning to heal.  He does not believe there will ever be two Chinas, but only war until they are integrated into a peaceful whole with nothing of a Pax Romana about it.
          Kevin has wrangled us a few more days in the Glacier Hotel by combining our reservations with Lizzie's.  I have been crying a great deal.  I feel that Mariah took a piece of me with her.  We were so much alike, but because of the rheumatism, I never got to be the part of me that she was.  She had so many years of it that her love was everything to me.
             Kevin takes advantage of me when I cry which is very much to my good.  I am very much in a better spirit when we are through with the sort of thing that married people do.  One of our neighbors who became friends with Lizzie , Vi, and Mariah thought it wrong enough that she spoke about it in the corridor.  She offered to speak to Kevin if I felt that I could not.  I said that I felt very much comforted by my husbands' attentions, but would try to be more discreet.  She said that it was not that sort of thing at all and that people never pay any mind to such things unless the circumstances are unusual and the people well known to them.  Please write me soon.  I will hope to find a letter when I get home.  We are going to Willets.  I will work on my house.  You must come soon and take the room that I was putting in for Mariah.  Kevin has an obligation to the Brummets.

                            With all my love,
                                        your daughter Allie

   
    Chapter

           Blaine took the monorail  into Philly and a taxi from Penn Station to a west side address.  He had logged in the visit with his sister, who was married to a Brummet, as a hunt for one of the Brummet boys, Kevin's favourite.  It was he who had carved the ancient Mathesson crest when the old bohemian had died in California in 1968.  It looked well against the black yew wood carved in California madrone. 
        Cory was not thought to be cut out to be a rancher and had gone to globetrotting with his father in that signal year.  Mariah Sutherland had followed her old friend, the Mathesson, by only a week.  That was to stick up for him at the bar of justice, some still said.  For it would be mercy the old reprobate would be wanting. 
          
         Cory had helped his father and his Aunt Collie, with some poets Kevin Mathesson had gotten for the price of paying their fares to Europe, pack up the London house and put it up for auction.  Cory Brummet was old, but living, praise God, as was Blaine himself.  He had gotten in the habit of tinkering in his own DNA, but it was more often said that storks have a special relationship with the angel of death as they must work so carefully with the ministering angels that arrange the bonding of spirit and body into human soul. 
          The old man met him at the door with his still pretty eighty-year old wife standing a little bit behind him.  His sole and singular wife had been an alto with the Boston camerata and had followed her around, carving whatever wood he found to be local.  "His whittling", he called it.  He had had one child , a son.  Cory had also become pregnant that summer.  Cory had dubbed the baby 'the freak of nature' and carried the baby on his shoulders the summer he met Ezra Pound and the poets had chanted Buddhist mantras to him while beating old Chinese drums.  With Cory and his wife was his wife's daughter, conceived by the stork in one of his famous test tubes.  The baby was the legal daughter of her father who had kept her in Eskdale in the heavenly Snake Valley to study music when his wife went on tour.  In time she met Cory and he confessed that he was more inclined to the affections of a local woman whose husband had died of cancer.  She lived  with her parents and a divorced daughter who had four children.  They had rebuilt the block after the big shake, joining several of the old townhouses into one narrow building.  The interior of the block they had left the same, but had removed the old fences.   Cory thought that the new epoxy putty gave the buildings an unnatural look but the old trees and flowerbeds and the paths running along between them were lovely. 
        It was a fall morning with the snap of apples in the air, Blaine's favourite time to be east.  Cory's oldest grandaughter had had a child die of leukemia and had never had any others.  She thought that she would like to have a clone of her father.  She had received Blaine's lecture on the unneccessary nature of cloning and the delusionary nature that the child would bare any precise resemblance to the original beyond a crude physical one.  The woman said that  her reasons were personal and sentimental.  Since Blaine could do it, he really saw no reason not to.  He did not approve of cloning if he felt that unreasonable expectations would be placed on the child.  It was his work to clone bodies, not souls.  If she wanted someone to carve Mathesson crests for coffins after her father died, that  might be a practical one.  His father made lovely walnut coffins with red crests for Mathessons and other sentimental Scots.   

          Evy and I plan to come to see Mother after Allie is back and well settled in for the winter.  She is building herself a house where the twins will both have rooms.  That will mean that Evy and I will have more time on our own.  Lizzy very much wants to continue on the work on the papers as do Allie and Evy.  Lizzy was about the Pound-Hulme circle and was particularly fond of Hilda Doolittle.  She was far less deeply involved than Donald and is more likely to remember dresses that bloomed for a day like flowers then wilted, pregnancies and romances, not uncommonly in that order than she is to remember anything of the serious writing of men who afterward went to war and died.
        I think there is much to be done with the writing of the women who were in Allied countries at that time.  Lizzie wishes I would bother myself with this and perhaps I shall.
        Without Donald, I have lost heart for the Marshall papers.  Kevin says he will try to revive it when he has time.  I know of few men who watched the Asian war come on with the clarity of mind of Mr. Marshall.  Once it was well under steam he watched it progress with a grief and sorrow.  He felt that he had worked with a will for his span of days and was more interested in the bees in the garden and the young minds in his family than even the most momentous affairs of state.  I very much miss Enoch.  I wish we could do away with death and birth, both of them for they are a terrible bother.  Weddings are a bother too if you do not feel a like distaste.  You have not had a year like ours.  I envy you in your unencumbered state and do not really know why I am not in it with you.  I ought to have taken up condoms the first time you pilferred some from the apothecary.  I suppose that has made the difference. 
                  

                                      Dan

  Dear Mother,
         Ally and Evy, the golddust twins, wish to invite you to visit next August. They are doing this because I wish to invite you to visit in July. It took Evy three days to convey to me the complete impossibility of a July visit. She is leaving in April for the April conference in Salt Lake and be back in August. This is my devoted wife.
      She is a leaving in April so that she will be short of having the baby in Heaver City, Utah with her friend, Dr. Wilhemina and her granny friend Josie in attendance. Jolsie taught elementary school and moonlighted as a mid wife for women with the opdd disposition of marrying only one man together. They actually plan these births, Mother, so that the babies will come together. Then one of the women can pass them off as twins. My twins are quietly suspected to be the children of someone else, because, well, that is so very common you see.
      You do see, don't you Mother, my Evy may or may not be back in August for her family does not think me good enough for her and have plenty of more amiable men to whom to attach her if Dr. Willy delievers the baby, then, well, I do not know whether I could afford to take off enough time to go to Utah and get my baby back.
      Ally assures that nothing of the kind will occur. That Evy will be back with the baby in August to visit with you whether see continues our marriage or not. Evy is not speaking with because of the business of me wanting her to be in California  in July. There is a time of a reunion that begins with the 4th when people parade their babies down the street to show off how many they have. They put them is cute little floats mounted on little red wagons and let them ride their bicycles and tricycles down the street. I'm afraid the federal legacy in Utah has resulted in an undersized 4th of July celebration.
      On the 24th of July all the Mormon wards get together and get a real fancy parade with twisted crepe paper flowers and covered wagons, even some hand carts that have been maintained by their original owners progeneters because no one wants to miss that. Everyone stays. Even if the men have to go back to work, the women and children stay. Evy says that she has given in and given in and given in to me until if she gives much more there won't be much of her left to give in and she will get out instead. It is like one of those old fairy tales: I have three more wishes and I need to take care with them.
      I really think Ally likes me better than Evy now that she is married. We agree it is because she did not try to marry me. Evy tries to do the best thing for everyone all the time and has bitten off more than she can chew. I love Evy. Perhaps I will be some day I will be a man more solicitious to his wifes desires. I will never understand Mormons. If I ever thought I was cut out to be the President of Utah and bring them all in line, it was the arrogance of youth. I have repented this.
      Kevin says the mark of a good general is that he only gives orders that his troops with follow, and hence in the more able to cut a fine figure with his troops marching behind him. Kevin thinks it is the mark of a good husband and I wish Evy had married him. Perhaps she shall. Since there seems to be no end to his money they need not be any end to his wives, I suppose.
      I do not know what religion kevin is and he says he does not know either. He tries to be to evey end no religion and to be and do only what seems to be rational and right to him. His mother is the second wife if a man with four wives, now wandering in the third heaven with his first two.
         If I take another one when Evy has left me, which I think she will, this year or another, I will let Ally pick her out. Ally says I must do, for men are no geed at this sort of thing and I would only get myself in another muddle.
      Do please come in August. You will adore Lizzie and Vi. If you spent the summer seeing the west with them they would not be disappointed. They might even be able to arrange and earlier visit with their grandchildren and their mothers. You could send home postcards from color country. They are both good sweet women. If I were one of their people I think I would know how to love them, but I am not.

                          Your son,
                          Dan

  Dear Mama,
        We have had such a lovely fall here.  There aren't many trees that color up the way the trees and scrub do back home.  We've had a nice cold snap though, and the planted trees in town are sure nice.
          Dan's mother was sorry to miss you.  Lizzie and Vi tried to talk her into a trip down Mexico way.  I think she is glad to be back on terra firma.  She was interested by us and our ways and particularly fascinated by her visit with Evies' people.  Lizzie took her over to supper with your mother.  She took a semester of anthropology in college and thought it of great use.  I stayed up with Willie and Josie that week.  I do not want her to know about Kevin and we were likely to run into someone who would wish to be the first to congratulate me.  It would only take one.  I did call her at Grandma's to ask her how she was enjoying her visit.  She said that Grandma had fed her an excellent bread omelette with raspberry jam and fresh milk... weedy as all get out if I know our cows.  I have made their acquaintance and I like my milk that way.  She had asked for a supper typical of our region and got one.   Grandma likes maple syrup but she figured Dan's mom probably gets enough of that back home.
        We had a nice Halloween.  Dan was up at Lizzie's.  I took the three littluns and Lizzie and Vi made an orange and black cake.  We dressed Dan's creche up like leprechauns and they were quite endearing.  Evie did not want to see Dan and so sulked up at our house and called it waiting for trick-or-treaters. 
        Dan read a rambling Halloween piece.  Donald read between his first stroke and his second stroke.  The first was after his attempting the old Scots remedy and the second was within the week.  He could not move one hand and it was hard to hear but Kendrick took down his dream anyway.  It was good to read it and feel him among us.  Angelina had not heard it before and wept a little for Donald's mother was also her grandmother and she never as much saw her face.  Kevin asked me to send him a copy and I have just written one out for him.  You will have to see it when you come to see us and stay for a while, Mama.  Evie and I have plenty of room for you here.
          What you and Rachael have been doing with the songs Dad collected in Spain and from the vacqueros sounded interesting.  Dan, in particular, wishes we had copies of more of that here.  We have only the letters Dad sent Aunt Rennie.  I was teaching Marcella how to make pancakes with whipped up egg whites.  That's Dan's favourite way, and I asked her if she knew any songs.  She said they knew lots at home and we each sang bits and pieces of things and tried to match them up.  Tell Rachael she may not stay in Mexico to get folk songs.  I do hope she will come to see us before she goes off to India.  It is far away.
         The war is on the tv every night when we get it.  Dan brought up a big aerial from the city so we could watch.  If communism is so bad I don't know why we have to fight so hard against it.  Maybe Kevin will know when he comes home.  Dan says some of his friends are getting paid by the army to convince people that it is strategic.  I wish Dad were alive and could tell me what it is about.  It isn't that I am stupid or that I don't read the newspapers.  I just don't see why we should try to run other countries when we can barely run our own.
         I love you, Mama.  Rachael says you are having fun and I am glad,
                        
                               Allie

  Dear Kevin,
          I miss you so much I could cry and don't want to talk about it.  Annie wrote me such a sweet letter and asked me for Christmas since it is her turn.  She said that she thought I would find it hard to be so generous but that's natural, I being so newly married.  I have sent this to Collie's so it will be nearly Christmas when you get it.  I hope that your visit with Ezra Pound's daughter has been as interesting as you hoped and that Dans' friends got a lot of chanting and drumming done and got to ring their bells in the old gentleman's face. 
        I will fly to Elco or bring Evie or a Brummet to drive if the weather is bad.  Lizzie and Vi can help him with the babies.  I can't drive in ice.  Next Christmas, I want to have with you at Harlan's.

                                Your Allie

  P.S.
        Here is what Kendrick wrote down for Donald in the night that was almost his last.  It was summer, of course, but the dream was one of All Souls Eve.

                      

                        Samhain Fragment
          Love is no arbour,
          no deep chestnut shade
          enamoured of what it
          concealed.

          But a bloody tempest,
          a sudden raging flood
          of displaced sand
          from stone that plays
          as it embraces.

         
  And whether false or true,
  or perilous and peregrine,
  deaths' sunken eyes,
          hooded, pale-skulled
          and little peeping
          cherubs teasing about
  the corners or the deeper darkness of my evil room,
          excluded,
  welcome nothing can stop their
          endless peeping.
  indifferent voyeurs
  of mind and flesh
         
          And you, old man-
          Yea, old-
          have you plumbed the
          depths of the shade
          you arch over me
          while the leaves
          splatter on the ground
          by Samhaim
          will  they this year       
          That one golden storm that
          brings them down
          I will not even know when
          it is.
          I have no shelter
          but what you extend.

          Those days when the moon
          shines full in the skylight
          and southeast window
          at sunset, a season,
          though mine,
          stripped away.

          And so you offer a certain
          kind of pillow, a shoulder
          muscled as beef, perfumed
          breath, giddy and delicious
          some mom thing
          about keeping kin together
          though we'd be naught in God talk
          but cousins.
            As though we carve our fates.
          As though the cholera might
          not breeze through  everything again
          rendering it more threadbare
          it even now eats through the fabric
          of our promises
          like woolworms nesting and shredding
          death pee-peeing and spitting
          above doors that stay ravaged
          swinging on their hinges as they will do
          once burned the blackened cot
          still screaming with fire
          nothing made anew or brought
          to an end.

          All Souls:  Catechism to a Lost Son

          How many are the seasons,
  `        my laddie?
          Four, Minnie.

          How many the worthy
          days of notice?
          Four,or eight as a man
          craves to count them, Minnie.

          How many the tears shed
          by the Christ for Lazarus?
          Fewer than they might have been
          had he not been Christ.
          And what was Lazarus risen
          but a common man again?
          Saved in the flesh, my Minnie,
          to rise at the last trumpet.
     

      It was so long ago that Donald's mother was born that I can't even think.  The saints were being burned out of Missouri and Sutherland, a park for sheep and large white deer.   
         
         
  My dear sister,

       My father's wife has told me of your marraige to your dear friend Kevin.  I have thus made you this flute.  It is like the one I have which you so admired.
       I hope the children are very well and hearty.  If they are not, call me at our rooms and I will pray for them.
       The classes here are good, but Rachael or Ellie must come with me to write notes in English or I would know nothing of what was being said.  I am learning Spanish quickly.  When we are not doing university work, no one will speak English to me.  It brings loneliness to my heart, but I know it is neccessary.
      We have not told the school _______'s age and they have not made inquiries.  I think they know she is young.  If she can do the work, they are pleased with her.  I think she will be a good teacher.  Your mother may enter the teacher's college next term.  She wishes to teach in Mexico where she has much family.
      This term she writing out melodies to the songs Enoch or Rachael collected in Spain.  They have the words in the library here, but less often the music.  Sometimes they have different music.
      It is strange music to me.  In Tibet we think of this world as full of shadows of the real world and that we pass into this brighter world of clearer impressions at our deaths.  It was not until the Chinese came that anyone understood grief.  Rachael says that the sinuous mourning of the Spanish and Jewish songs is because there has been so much suffering.  There is beauty and love.  Then the enemy
  comes.   Easier to pretend that it is a skeleton on a horse than the immense cruelty of human glory in barbarism.
      My friend Kendrick did me a great kindness when he sent me on to Mexico.  I might have fought the Chinese.  And thought good of what I did.  Our father was a soldier.  I do not understand this war.  In it I would be a phantom.  It seems to me that we go as the Chinese come to Tibet. 
      My opinion of it worsens.  I wonder if I might have the address of my father's friend, Dr. Fletcher.  I would like to know more of it.
      You are in my fondest thoughts, my sister.  Kiss the babies for me and give them this Mexican chocolate.  Tell them it has come from their Uncle _____.  I am sorry that your friends Moriah and Donald  are dead.  It is good to love.  We may still receive impressions from those who are gone but unless they are great souls, it is better for them to attend to the business of higher worlds and greater light where they may be taught.  It is best not to call too much after them if they were much loved.
      Our esteemed Kenyon called last night to make some matters more clear and it seems that we will be able to return for a time before taking leave of our dear families and our friends.
      When I entered the country it was with Rachael and she gave my age to the immigration authorities and owned me as her son.  The official seemed harried and tired - indifferent if perhaps there was a breach of custom committed on his part.
      Our father ought have sworn out some unit as to the time and circumstances of my birth, ie., that I was born to a Tibetan woman while he was missing in action and too ill to return to duty or travel to any duty station.   Because I entered a 9th form course of study at 17 and was studying in San Francisco with boys of military age and was unmarried, black as well.  Kendrick preferred a change of venue.  Kevyn said that as a married student with a child, I might cast away fear and return.
      There is good news, my sister. You are to be the Aunt of a tiny creature, part Mexican Indian and part Tibetan Nepalese, and part Mormon from Utah and American.  We shall return.  My wife is too young to be taken from her family without need.  I am teaching her Tibetan, though I can scarcely do so without failing upon occasion to speak Spanish.  When my Spanish is improved, we will for a time, speak only Tibetan.  Many of our people are no longer in our country.  They need the education to succeed in Nepal and India.  Otherwise, I fear for those of my faith who have hereto for been so terribly used.
      We will go to India or Nepal.  I would speak to you more of this war and what I said of the communists.  There have been many Europeans in Chinese with grand ideas to do one thing or another -- lay waste provinces in order to move in farmers, for instance.  This idea, that food and land should be shared is not the worst of these ideas.  It was not this idea that invaded Tibet -- it was the cruel notion that we should have only the existence of slaves for our own.  The making of slaves from the people is an hideous process.  Dan told me it has before involved the destruction of libraries -- in Alexandria and Mexico.  That, having suffered this, I should the more wish to assist in the invasion of Viet Nam I could not see, even when a professor, on the draft board, attempted to persuade me at length.
      We aided the communists in China against Japan and they fought with rectitude and ferocity.  If they felt obligated to assist a country through which their rail access ran, at Haiphong, and in which they had many expatriots who had so burdened them?  I cannot think they have sought this war.
      Is a militarized China in the interest of India or Nepal - this I doubt.  Kevyn says that if I return to America as a near father, it would be better for me to keep complete silence with regard to the war.
      If I do not return it will be because I fear that I cannot.  I am of my father's kindred and must always be having opinions.  My mother, Rachael, says that she is glad that she is too old to go to this war, as she is glad to have missed the first war.  I have thought that valor must seek its' purpose and she thought it a worthy thought.

              I love you, my dear sister.

                          Khanti Ebenezer Snow

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