The Lost Girl

This piece originally appeared in June 2008 on True Crime Weblog, the website of noted crime writer Steve Huff, and appears here with his kind permission. This case remains unsolved. 

by Larkin Vonalt

The woman is screaming into the television camera. There are words coming out of her mouth, but all you really hear is rage. Rage, and despair.  The pain is writ so large upon her face that even at a distance one cannot help turning away out of respect. The camera pans from the shattered woman back to a twenty-something television reporter. The reporter smiles, embarrassed, and with a tilt of her head, brightly offers her reprise to the night’s top story.

Hours before, Tammy Walker trod the hallways of the city morgue, her own green mile, to identify the body of her daughter. 77 days earlier she and her husband filed a missing person report for Heather Nicole Walker, age 18. The police, by their own admission, never looked for her.  Heather’s family and friends ran off flyers of the missing girl, posting them everywhere they could think of.  Now it was all for nothing.  When they’d turned out the lights the night before, there had still been hope, dangling on a string. There was still a chance that Heather would come banging through the door of the house on Gummer Street. Today, with the rising of the sun, that string snapped.

This evening Tammy Walker has returned to the alley where her daughter was found in a trashcan. Surely screaming can be the only reasonable response. 

Dayton, Ohio is a city of 157,000 people. The crime rate falls somewhere between that of Baton Rouge and Rochester though violent crime in Dayton is significantly less than both those cities.  Last year the Chief of Police was pleased to tell the media that Dayton had enjoyed its second straight year of diminishing crime. 

In the days following the discovery of Heather Walker’s body, the police defended their lack of action.

“Many adults go missing throughout the year,” Sgt. Chris Williams told the Dayton Daily News, adding that  “very few” turn out to be victims of foul play. They offer this information without apology. They are just cogs in a slowly grinding machine, one with no capacity to look for the needle in a haystack that is a girl lost in the streets.

Heather wasn’t the high school valedictorian. She wasn’t an accomplished coed at a prestigious university. When the media speaks of her they don’t use words like “gifted” or “promising” or “popular.” As if death wasn’t insult enough, they drop labels on her like stones: Troubled. Habitual. Runaway.

Heather’s parents had reported her missing before, six times in point of fact. But this time, Robert and Tammy Walker had been emphatic with the police: she had not taken her cell phone, or her wallet. In the past she had always called to let them know she was okay. Not this time. It didn’t matter that Heather’s absence was more sinister this February than on past occasions. She had passed that magic age. 18: you can’t buy a beer, but you can be tried as an adult, serve your country and be liable for your own debts. Oh, and the police won’t look for you anymore.

Mary McCarty, a Dayton Daily News columnist, chastised the police in a May 1 editorial for arbitrarily dismissing reports for missing individuals over 18, citing her own son, a 19-year old High School senior, as evidence of how childlike we still can be at that tender age, suggesting that the “cutoff” might be a little later.   McCarty quotes Kettering, Ohio Police Sgt. Craig Moore deftly sidestepping the issue: “That’s a societal thing; we’re simply following state law as it is written,” Moore said. “That would be a change for the state of Ohio to make.”

The Walkers’ coltish daughter, half-woman, half-child, had early on seized the privileges usually reserved for adults, and did not bridle easily to the very adult responsibilities of raising her young son.  The running away began when she was pregnant and reached epic proportions after Devin was born. The sixth time the police brought Heather home, just over a year ago, she left again ten minutes later. There would not be a seventh time.

Though suburbanites fear the predominantly black west side of Dayton, these blocks—east of Keowee, north of US 35—these are really Dayton’s mean streets. But like the natives of South Boston and the Bronx, the residents of East Dayton take pride in their gritty neighborhood, wearing their survival like a badge of honor. 

Largely white, it is an area plagued with vandalism, theft, prostitution, homelessness, drug abuse and murder. The kids here ape black culture, posing on their MySpace pages and YouTube videos with rolls of cash, guns, bottles of Jagermeister. They imitate the speech, the dress, the swagger of the ghetto. It might be comical if it wasn’t so deadly. They’ve got the rims, the grills, they throw up the signs, pose for photos at the gravesites of their friends.

It isn’t just Heather they mourn, but also Andy Rush, who died Easter Sunday last year, accidentally shot in the head by his best friend, Tommy. His “Moms” had died just a few days before that, of cancer. Younger brother Mikey eulogizes all of them on his My Space profile. A few days ago there was a reference there to Heather, he called her his “future wife;” but to look at the profile now you’d never know they were friends. A guy’s got pressures, you know.

Heather wasn’t much of a diarist; she started four or five MySpace pages, but was never a regular presence there. Even so, the media noted that those pages were  “laced with obscenities.”  On both the pages that she got off the ground, she fusses about Devin’s father, Justin James Holbrook. “And for those bitches who want my baby daddy, go ahead and have him. He may look good to you and everything, but the thing is he has nothing to offer you, he don’t even have anything to offer his own son.”

On one of Heather’s early, abandoned profiles, Justin commented “hey if u ever get on here n check ur shit delete me from ur friends cause i dont want u to know nething bout wat i do so do me a favor n delete me k.” Their son, Devin, was about three months old then, and Heather was out the door as often as not.

It’s the pictures on Heather’s profile that finally provide a real glimpse of the girl behind the pose. Heather, laughing. Heather scowling, and yes, Heather (and a friend) stacking gang signs.  Heather vibrant, her arms bare and smooth, a curtain of shiny hair, a wide, wide grin, goofing for the camera. Heather alive. 

As a juvenile, Heather Walker had brushes with the law; shoplifting a pair of shoes, joyriding in a stolen car, the details carefully spelled out in the local newspaper days after her body was discovered.  There is no record for her as an adult. She had dropped out of Belmont High, but she wasn’t alone in that. Four out of every ten students there don’t make it to graduation.  On “academic watch,” the Dayton public high school features a “computer technology theme,” but has no school website.  93 percent of its students are considered “economically disadvantaged.”

On Wednesday, February 6, Heather is thought to have been on her way to a birthday party for her older brother, Rob. She is seen about 7:30 in the parking lot of Sam’s Market, a down-at-the-heels corner grocery on East Third Street, two miles from home, three blocks from where her body will be found.  By Saturday morning, she has still not come home and her parents turn to the police.  The police follow procedure as for any missing adult, other than those considered “endangered.” They issue a 72-hour alert, and when it expires, they forget about her.

Eleven weeks later, on a warm April morning, three passersby wend their way down an alley half a block off East Third.  One of them spots a pair of shoes hanging out of a city-issued trash bin. Deciding to take the shoes, they cross thirty feet from the alley to the edge of the abandoned building where the green plastic can rests. Reaching for the shoes, they make a horrible discovery. The shoes are still on Heather’s feet.

Heather’s friends bring balloons to the site. Balloons, and stuffed toys. Letters, poems, photographs of their lost friend. It is raining, the notes run, the photos smear, the candles flicker. In the rain, in an alley in a gin-soaked neighborhood, her friends weep, stunned with grief. A photograph of Devin visiting Heather’s shrine shows a beautiful and bewildered little boy.

Heather’s father has mapped his grief upon his chest, an image of Heather; peaceful, contemplative, is newly tattooed there.  Two dozen of his Mixed Martial Arts students file past, their heads bowed. Bushi Combat, where he teaches, honors Heather on their website. All that combat training, and no one to save her.  Robert Walker does not rage into the television camera as his wife does, but it is clear that the death of his baby girl has broken him.

The coroner issues a statement that Heather Nicole Walker had been dead “for a while,” yet her parents identify her in the hours immediately following her discovery. While her father concedes there was decomposition, he ventures that “her head hadn’t been bashed in or anything.” It’s unlikely Heather spent eleven weeks in the trash can, as the mild Ohio spring would have rendered her to state that no one would ask a parent to contemplate.

On the box that houses her ashes, the date of death is March 1, 2008; an estimate arrived at with the help of the medical examiner.  It begs the question. Where was Heather for the 23 nights between February 6 and March 1?  Was she captive? Was she frightened? Was she cold?

No cause or manner of death has been established. There were no signs of trauma on her body. She was not stabbed or shot or strangled. There was no blunt force trauma. Determining asphyxiation after a certain point of decomposition is very difficult. Life isn’t like CSI: lab tests take weeks, sometimes longer, to complete. Sometimes the answers never come.

As if rushing to pre-empt the media’s speculation, Robert Walker muses to a Dayton Daily News reporter that his daughter might have died of a drug overdose. Without the toxicology reports, the Montgomery County Coroner is not willing to make that leap yet.

The Coroner’s office director Ken Betz told the paper that he “cannot support that, because pathologists have not officially determined when and how Heather Walker died.”

If the cause of death is revealed in the toxicology report, it may well put an end to any homicide investigation. Without evidence of having been dosed against her will, the best the D.A. can offer her parents in that circumstance is the possible charge of “abuse of a corpse.” That is, if they ever find anyone to charge.

Drug overdose or not, no one is buying that Heather climbed into a trashcan on her own. Why would someone go to such lengths to conceal an accidental death? Or was their means of disposing of the body some kind of cruel joke?  Though the house near the site is empty, the grass is kept mowed. Heather’s father said he talked to the people who had cut the grass just a few weeks before his daughter’s body was found.  “They said that trash can was not there when they mowed,” he told the Dayton paper. “Someone killed Heather. I am staying on this.”

Heather Walker: daughter, mother, sister, friend.  Not just lost, but stolen.

A Death in the Family, Not Our Own

Observations on the Death of Edward M. Kennedy

 

My eyes are tired from crying. They feel tight around the edges, and gritty. I don’t know why I’ve been crying, really. I didn’t know the man. I’m sure I voted for him a time or two. But since Wednesday afternoon I’ve curled in my velvet armchair with a tissue in one hand and a cup of tea or a bit of toast in the other and I have watched television and I have wept.

My husband woke me early on Wednesday morning, touching my shoulder. He’s been downstairs to make coffee, watch the morning news. “Hi.”

“Hi.”

“Senator Kennedy died,” he says quietly, setting a coffee mug on the table next to the bed.

“Oh no,” I mumble, still sleepy, trying to process. That’s right, he’d been ill. Cancer. Some pundits speculated that he might make it back to the hill for the health care vote. No wonder the President wanted to see a vote on the bill before the recess.  “I guess he didn’t have as much time as they thought,” I say to my husband.

Drifting back to sleep, I dream about my father. In the dream, I am sitting with him and with his wife and we are looking at a calendar for this October.  I am trying to work out a time to visit with them again before October comes, and I am asking if Dad will have enough time, if there will still be time then. When I wake up, the coffee is cold. My father has been dead for more than three years, from cancer.

We’d thought there would be a bit more time. I’d said goodbye to Dad just before Christmas, we’d rushed back to Montana so that our 11-year-old son could fulfill the obligations of his role in the school play. Why didn’t the school tell us that someone else could have filled in? Why did we even care?  It doesn’t matter now. There were plans to go back before New Year’s, but on the day after Christmas the call came. 

The dream has left me feeling unsteady.  It was the worst of times, in some ways, that parceling out of Saturdays and holidays and the weeks that may or may not be left. Dad had already been robbed of his speech by then, his larynx taken in an aggressive attempt to stave off a more aggressive cancer. It made the difficult discussions nearly impossible. Emails had gone misunderstood, or unanswered, or sent back too quickly in anger.

I am scattered, unable to work, or concentrate. I can’t get comfortable in my Aeron chair, I keep thinking about the 800 miles between here and Massachusetts. I don’t understand why I want to go.  On most television channels, nothing has changed; it is a normal Wednesday afternoon– soaps, Judge Judy, Ellen deGeneres.  But my husband is watching MSNBC, and there they have begun to bang the funeral drum.

In the kind of fortuitous timing that television producers only dream of, Chris Matthews (the host of Hardball, the man who never lets his guests finish a sentence) has just finished a documentary about the Kennedy brothers, and he has been promoting its debut for Thursday.  They’ve moved the first showing up to Wednesday night, and they will air it every night for the rest of the week. I carry the laptop into the living room to watch the talking heads talk about Ted.

I could catch a 3 a.m. train out of Toledo, Ohio that would get me to South Station at 9 p.m., with a return on Sunday that gets me into Toledo at 11 p.m. It’s a three hour drive from here to Toledo. I can catch a flight on Friday, out of Dayton. Do I really want to spend $350, though? I mean, why is it I want to go?  It’s an 800-mile drive, 13 hours no matter how you cut it. When I picture myself driving to Boston, I am not behind the wheel of my Saab, but rather in the driver’s seat of my 1984 Volkswagen Rabbit. The one I bought new in Brookline, Massachusetts 25 years ago.

Boston. My old town, a hodge podge of memories, pieced and crumpled; some things stand in sharp relief, much more is faded from an 18 year absence.  I might have met Ted Kennedy then, or not. Like Duvall Patrick says at the Memorial Service, “I knew him long before I ever met him.”  I worked campaigns for Mike Dukakis and Mel King and Walter Mondale.  I remember meeting John Kerry and Joe Kennedy. Perhaps I just saw him at a distance. It doesn’t matter.  He belonged to Massachusetts and Massachusetts belonged to him. His death is like that of a distant family member; we grieve regardless.

And there is that other thing, that Kennedy thing. Seeing those patrician faces drawn in sorrow, to hear their strong voices crack and tremble excavates memories, milestones of a childhood in turbulence.  I was not quite two when President Kennedy’s life came to an abrupt close. A Friday, around lunchtime, in Murray Kentucky. My father would have been teaching. Perhaps my mother had put me down for a nap. Though I think I have no memory of the assassination, I’m certain that memory resides within me: my parents bowed with sadness, that sense of order shattered forever.

The June morning after the assassination of Bobby Kennedy I jumped out of bed, six years old, braids flying, ready for another summer day and found the house silent, my parents stunned and weeping, the world turned topsy-turvy once again.

The melody of this death is different, but similar. He is the only brother to have lived anything like a natural life expectancy; a man who must have expected at any time that he might be gunned down by some lunatic. He’d cheated death twice before, in a plane crash that left his aide and the pilot dead; he was pulled from the wreckage with a broken back and negligible pulse.  And again in the notorious car crash that took the life of Mary Jo Kopechne, he was left physically unscathed. When they review his length of life, they compare and we remember, and we grieve again.

Now we are spying on his great barn of a house in Hyannisport. They tell us that last week Teddy was rolled down to his schooner, the Mya, in a wheelchair, and that, somehow miraculously shielded from the press, he was taken for one last sail.  We watch one young grandson (Teddy III, as it turns out) pull faces at the camera crews as he flops and flounces around the driveway, killing time. He’s 11. His hair is to his shoulders. Another grandson, young Max, a year older, comes out in a Navy blazer, khaki shorts and flip-flops. No wonder the world is going to hell in a handbasket, even the Kennedys can’t get their children to cooperate.

The casket comes to the hearse borne by the honor guard, who move precisely in that strange shuffling half-step that looks like they might break out into a Busby Berkeley routine at any minute, though of course they never do.  The family flows out from the house, cascading down the steps and out across the lawn. They stand together for a moment, in a brittle silence as the casket eases into the hearse, and then disperse again, like a spilled drink spreading out across the floor. A couple of the men pat the flank of the funeral coach as they pass by, the way you might pat the neck of a willing horse.

We watch the journey from Hyannisport to the Library, as people line the roads and the overpasses and stop their cars and getting out to stand as the hearse passes by. We watch thousands fill the sidewalk to the presidential library, waiting. They mop their brows in the August heat. I am glad that I decided not to drive out, putting pragmatism over sentiment: my father would have been proud. Later, we watch ordinary men and women, those constituents that Kennedy long championed, file past the flag-draped casket. A few dip in reverence, or make the sign of the cross, hand flashing brow to chest, shoulder to shoulder. Others simply stand and stare.  

Friday is punctuated with real life interspersed with television commentary. I don’t have much to say, though my husband is more and more responding to the unending parade of stories with remarks like “That’s so sad,” or “I had no idea he did that, wasn’t that wonderful.”  The rants of talk radio hosts outrage him. I am just too tired to feel rage, and besides, why would they change their stripes now? Occasionally I help him sort out one of the Kennedy clan from another. Joe. Carolyn. Rory. Patrick.

That evening we tune in to the Memorial Service at the Presidential Library, which MSNBC brings us without commercial interruption. I laugh long and hard at the stories told by John Culver, a former Senator from Iowa who had been Ted’s longtime friend and classmate at Harvard. His account of crewing (fifty years ago) for Kennedy on the Victura (now berthed outside the Library) could have been out of an old Shelley Berman routine. As someone who has been dragged out in heavy weather to sail with someone who promised there was “nothing to it,” I understood his tale very well.  As the stories unfold across the evening, the people who love Ted Kennedy breathe life back into the memory of the man.

We hear about how Kennedy loved to paint, and sing. The “history trips” on which he shepherded his children and his nieces and nephews, escaping from the last one (a camp out) and seeking refuge in the Ritz. We hear of his never-ending concern for the common man, his generosity, his astounding memory for names and faces, and his larger than life gestures. Duvall Patrick tells a story of inviting Senator and Mrs. Kennedy to dinner at their house in the Berkshires. By the time the event rolls around, the Senator has added six or seven more dinner guests, including musicians from nearby Tanglewood, amidst Mrs. Kennedy’s aghast apologies. There’s a familiar bell in that story.

We weep along with Orrin Hatch, and note the catch in Joe Biden’s voice when he talks about the comfort Kennedy brought him after the deaths of Biden’s wife and young daughter in a car accident. We argue gently about what race is Brian Stokes Mitchell. (Black, as it turns out.)  He is there to sing “The Impossible Dream,” but his rendition is so perfect that it doesn’t stir me the way I expected. Perhaps if Willie Nelson had sung it instead.  At the end I sing back to them an occasional snatched phrase of “When Irish Eyes are Smiling.”  The broadcast ends, but the song goes on.

I knew another man who lived like this, larger than life. A man who loved to paint and sing, one alternately adored and despised by those who knew him. The kind of man who invited people to someone else’s dinner party. My mother married him; he became my stepfather who was not quite my father, just as my father became somewhat not my father either. A British physician, he also sailed an enormous schooner (the 62 foot Charlotte Jean, as compared to Kennedy’s 50 foot Mya).

He made me believe I could do anything and he instilled in me a great deal of confidence. That is, when I wasn’t wishing I could crawl under some rug to escape his booming enthusiasm, his demanding standards and all the eyes upon us. He too had never-ending concern for the common man, often treating patients without charging them, should they not be able to pay. He took in the stray, the wounded, the faint at heart and he gave them jobs, a place to sleep (sometimes in the guest room, and if that was full, on the sofa) he challenged them and encouraged them, rode them hard at times to make them better.

The stories about him still are legion. How he drove through the worst snowstorm in 20 years to deliver a baby. How if you admired something he’d give it to you. The way he’d hand off twenty dollar bills to panhandlers in the street. I heard echoes of those stories in the Kennedy library. I know what a man like those men are like, and it makes for wonderful tales, but it’s also a very hard way to live, in the shadow of the Lion. And yet, I would not have been what I am today without him.

He took his leave over ten years ago, his heart exploding in his chest, dead before his body reached the floor, roaring out of this world and into the next. A scientist will tell you that energy is never destroyed, that it is merely transformed into some other sort of energy. His energy was prodigious and it spilled over into more than a year’s worth of strangely comforting if somewhat disturbing array of phenomena. He left quickly, but he did not go gently.

No wonder I weep now.

On the fourth day the cameras train their gaze on the familiar face of Our Lady of Perpetual Help. The basilica where Kennedy is venerated is a block down the street from the house of an old friend. When you walked down the hill from his house, towards the college we both attended, it was as if we were walking to the church. Once we reached Tremont, we’d turn and continue down the hill. Online now, he complains bitterly about his freedoms being curtailed due the funeral. He is reminded that the entire government sits in the basilica on this rainy Saturday, all three branches. His inconvenience is a minor thing in light of that. He wonders aloud how the Kopechne family must feel about all this.

Around the corner, on St. Alphonsus, some jerk had come careening through a stop sign and wrecked my little Volkswagen. That was more than twenty years ago. Both my father and stepfather were very much alive then, would be with us another decade, longer. Ted Kennedy too. I didn’t realize how rich I was, back then, afforded the luxuries of sweet time.

Seeing the Bushes and the Carters and the Clintons and the Obamas gathered together in the pews, the rarest of fraternities, drives home again the way in which so many people felt connected to Edward Kennedy, and serves to underscore how they were the closest we ever had to a royal family.  There’s not another political family where we can name most of the siblings and who they married and how each one died and can name at least some of their children, and their accomplishments and their failures. It seems that Al Gore must not have cared much for Uncle Teddy; his absence among the pols is conspicuous.

The boys are deft at eulogizing their father; Teddy Jr. polished enough to set the pundits speculating that perhaps he could carry the Kennedy torch, even though it is Patrick who has a reasonable career in the political spectrum. It was the pundits that thought the older brothers were the brighter lights back when it was Jack and Bobby and Ted, too.  Grandson Teddy (III) is courting the press now that he intends to follow in Grandpa’s footsteps, he says. When, in the line of cousins, he steps forward to speak, he parrots his grandfather’s 1980 concession speech  “the cause endures, the hope still lives, and the dream shall never die.”  Without the thunder, it’s only words.

When we return to the television late in the afternoon, the body of the Senator has not yet arrived at the Capitol steps. As has been the case from the beginning, the schedule is awry.  Senator Robert Byrd, age 91, sits on the curb in his wheelchair, wiping his eyes, holding a small American flag.

Many of the Hill staffers have gathered here, for more than an hour in the muggy August afternoon. They are quiet and orderly, standing patiently as if for an enormous group portrait. On the Washington mall, more people wait. Along the boulevards of the District, they wait, along the bridge over the Potomac, in the Lincoln Memorial, lining the path to Arlington, they wait.

When at last the family does arrive, utterly exhausted, finally crumpling from the weight of their sadness and the endless duties of public mourning, the crowds erupt in a brilliant show of admiration. The only “off” note comes here in the form of an officious and awkward Congressional chaplain, who takes Vickie Reggie Kennedy firmly by the elbow and steers her away from the people she has come to meet so that she can stand at attention while he makes his fussy speech. As the motorcade drives away through the streets of Washington, people call out–  “Thank you!”  “We love you!”

At Arlington, the sun is beginning to set, just as it was for the burials of the two brothers. Cardinal Terrence McCarrick, the former archbishop of Washington, gently leads the last rites in the deepening gloam of evening. The images on the television become grainy and dim, until finally the cameramen give up and focus instead on the bugler playing taps, outlined in the light from Arlington House; lingering on the vibrant dance of the eternal flame.

Teddy’s granddaughter steps up to speak. Kiley Kennedy, just 15, begins, catches herself in a sob, and cries out “I can’t say anything!” But she pulls herself together and goes on to recount the happy hours spent sitting with her grandfather early on summer mornings on the porch of the Hyannisport house. But she is cloaked in darkness now; we can’t see her, even if we can hear the anguish in her voice.

When it is all over, I turn off the television before yet another replay of a Kennedy documentary. Enough is enough. I am exhausted, as if I too had waited in the line, as if I had sat in the pew under the soaring arches of Our Lady, as if I had stood on the steps of Congress waiting through the afternoon.

I carry my cup of tea outside and sit on the patio in the dark, looking up at the stars. I miss my father. I miss my stepfather.  Even though I won’t feel Ted Kennedy’s absence, I will miss his guiding hand and heart in the senate. I keep thinking about how the funeral ran late at every turn, and I wonder if that was perhaps by design. Surely it is more secure not to stick close to a well-publicized itinerary?

Most importantly, though, it gave the family an opportunity for a private ending to a very public life. In the end, in the dark they make their peace and say goodbye. They reclaim their own, and we release him.

Homecoming

When I open the door of the empty house, the dog rushes in ahead of me. He barks, shouts of joy, but they die to nothing. He looks back at me, quizzical. Where is everyone?  Perhaps they are out back, he must think, racing to the back door, begging to be let out. I unlock the door onto a patch chest high with weeds. He does not go out. Instead, he looks up at me, circles and sinks into a dejected heap.

We’ve come back to this house many times, Dog and I. Returning from journeys that crossed the country from border to border: family occasions, dog shows, girl journalist and her Dog in search of stories. Each time the door had opened on a cheerful cacophony of singing hounds, the television, the boy jubilant at our return. There was always someone there to embrace us, usually a meal on the stove, another dog or two rushing up to touch noses.

Not so this time. Now the house is silent, inhabited only by mice and memories. A fine layer of dust covers every surface. One door has blown open sometime over the winter. The Dog leaps to his feet to follow me as I move from room to room; not a chance that he’s going to let me out of his sight. He doesn’t know what’s become of the other dogs, but he is doing his best to avoid their fate.

Four days before we’d said goodbye to those dogs and husband and son, leaving Ohio for a few weeks in Montana to clean out the old house. He knew that. But dogs don’t think in abstract. (One of our dogs is very upset to hear a family member on the other end of a telephone; she’s very distressed that her person is locked up in that tiny box and how did they get in there anyway.) The dog knows only that they have always been here, and that they’re not here now.

I haven’t been in this house in a year. I haven’t lived here in two years, having taken our son in advance to start at a performing arts high school in Ohio. It’s a very complicated thing to move nearly two thousand miles across the country, leaving a pack of hounds, a coven of barn cats, a pair of crotchety ponies in your wake. My husband stayed on sorting out these conundrums: the ponies free to a family that found them delightful. The barn cats to a woman who’d just lost hers. One dog with cancer (Edward the Terrible) gently dispatched by our wonderful vet.

A few days before Christmas, on a morning when it should have been too cold to snow, but was snowing anyway, my husband loaded up the remaining three dogs in a minivan stuffed full of clothes, shoes, books, television, crockery and Christmas presents, and made his escape. The Dog and I have come to deal with what he left behind. Mail still on the kitchen table, a dozen chain link dog runs, letters from my late father, old toys, chipped coffee cups, books.

I did not choose this house. My husband’s ex-wife had insisted on it, a miner’s cabin with a singlewide trailer addition, creek side in the shadow of the Absaroka Mountains. Her twin sister still lives a mere quarter mile down the road. Then Merrilee decided to take their daughters and leave Elmer, and the proximity of her sister wasn’t so important anymore. We tried to sell the house 16 years ago but the market hadn’t boomed, and when we finally got an offer, we would have had to borrow money to accept it.

So I relented and moved in. First the trailer had to go. Then the green and tan shag carpet. The accordion door. In the end, we took the house down to the studs, moved the kitchen and the bathroom, put in a new stairwell. And then we stopped, leaving unfinished sheetrock on the walls, window moldings stacked in the barn. Elmer was working double shifts at the railroad; my newspaper work kept me away all hours. We were too damned tired when we got home to do anything other than the essential. And dry wall mud never reached the level of essential.

Montana was home for 17 years, longer than anywhere else. Two years ago when I set out behind the wheel of the Penske truck I didn’t look back. Our son had overstayed his welcome at the country school he attended. Elmer had retired from the railroad. I’d long finished my work as a journalist in this town. There was nothing keeping me in that little house in the shadow of the mountains.

Now it was very strange to be back.

In my return, I have fallen into the arms of friends, I have driven slowly up and down the streets of the town before going west to the house, a little panicked that I am touching the tar baby and will not be able to leave.

This is the house where my child was conceived. This is the house where he took his first steps. It is also where he fractured his leg badly in a freak accident. He was two; it was the day after Christmas, in the middle of a blizzard.  The ambulance wasn’t running, our tiny truck cab was too small, we had to call Jane and Roger to help us get him to Bozeman, and they struggled out to collect us and sat around all night in the hospital while the orthopedist saw to Julian’s leg.

This is the place where we welcomed foals on wobbly legs, watched them grow into promising yearlings. Watched in horror as one hung herself from one leg from a round pen panel, pressured there by a ranch hand who thought he could train horses. When we pulled the pins the filly kicked the panel free. It hit my mother square in the face, knocking her unconscious. Paramedics knelt in the muck to ease her onto a stretcher.

Horses are buried there and there and there; a young stallion that tried to jump a neighbor’s barbed-wire fence and bled out; an ancient mare down with colic, a foal crippled from birth— a Northern Dancer grandson. His mother had gotten into astragalus; it causes birth defects. When he was tiny he could outrun half the horses on the place.

Up on the ridge is a spot where I took off my coat on a winter day to wrap it around the a calf half-dead from hypothermia, rubbing him hard all over to bring back the circulation while someone else ran for the phone.  Just a day or so old, the little white-faced guy had fallen through the fence and rolled a bit down the hill. His mother, a first-timer, wandered away and left him.  When the neighbor drove out along the pasture edge in his pick-up the calf was starting to respond. We put him in the warm cab of the truck, and I retrieved my coat. I heard they nursed the calf a day or so and he was good as new. That next fall he went off to slaughter, because well that’s what becomes of calves.

I was sitting at a desk in that corner of this little cedar shake house when the phone rang with the news that my mother in law had died. It was Elmer who answered when a call came from England that my stepfather was found dead in his apartment.  I was sitting there curled in an oak desk chair, waiting for the call that my father, my anchor, had taken his leave, and when it came the world tilted dangerously beneath my feet. 

This big mailbox used to be affixed to a large Poplar trunk we’d pulled out of the grove on the other side of the creek. In time, it rotted and broke off. We stuck the broken post in a galvanized trashcan full of river rocks and travertine. Every time it snowed the plow knocked it over, and it is lying on the ground now. 

That’s where I’d get the mail, get out of the car, open the gate. If there was something promising, I might open it walking to the gate. That’s where I opened a very ordinary looking envelope with my name scrawled across it. It was a letter telling me I’d won a prestigious fellowship. And that’s where I read the letter of acceptance welcoming Julian to a performing arts high school.  From there you could see the snow capped peaks of the tallest mountains in Montana.

The task before me is enormous. It is not just packing up a few books. It is room after room of dust and memories and objects that require my attention. Every day I take a load of stuff to the storage unit. Every day I take a load of stuff to the county dumpsters.  We’ve decided to seek a renter, and that means restoring water to the winterized house. Which means buying a new water heater and having it installed. And when the water is restored, I find a pipe, cracked, that had somehow missed the winterization process, and I have to find a plumber, and then find the money to pay him. 

Every day starts before seven, with McDonald’s breakfast for the Dog and me.  Without fat and protein, I won’t last half the day; the regular restaurants don’t open for another hour.  At that hour McDonald’s trade is tourists headed south to Yellowstone Park, no one to stop me and inquire, where had I been, what was I up to.

Work continues each day until I am filthy and exhausted, walking in circles because I am too tired to think straight. On the good nights, I go back to my friend’s house and stand in the shower, before we repair to Park Place, the only decent bar in town.

The very first evening my regular drink is set before me with precision. The bartender still knows me well enough he doesn’t have to ask, so he asks other questions instead. Where had I been, what was I up to. The Martini is perfect, silver in my mouth.  On the last evening there I will tell Glenn, the proprietor and bartender that other than seeing my friends, sitting at his bar was the absolute best thing about being back in Montana. I regret the qualifier now; sitting in Glenn’s bar was seeing my friends, my past, and comfort was in the company, and not just (as on that last chilly night) Irish whiskey in the glass.

On the other nights, it’s not so good. Once the water is restored, I stay at the house; in the brass bed I slept in from the time I was 15. The Dog sleeps across my feet so that I cannot escape in the night.  The work is taking so much longer than I thought it would. I had thought that there would be people to give me a hand, and there are.

Jane and Roger stop by every couple of days, hauling trash, washing down walls, helping me drag out decades worth of junk. Jane’s mother died last year; she and her sisters were charged with the task of cleaning out the family home, and Jane knows what I’m up against. Their teenage daughter Emily comes out one morning and runs the Bush hog to knock down the waist high grass around the house.

It’s a cliché almost, that when you really need them that people will help you. The truth is that people are busy. They are busting their asses all day running a restaurant. She is a writer, looking after three small children and an elderly, compromised mother in law. She is working in a law practice 60 hours a week and putting up hay in the few hours of daylight left before and after a grueling workday. She is the only vet tech at the county’s very busy animal shelter. This is part of why I love them anyway, because they’re interesting people with full lives. I am grateful for all they give me.

But what about the others? How many stories did I write to support the opening of new businesses? How much free advertising did I give away? What about those Community Thanksgiving dinners I started and ran that fed 700 people each year? We gave whatever we could to every charity auction, every event, every theater production, every time someone needed us . . . but this is Montana, a place where it’s unseemly to ask for help.

Unless you’re dying or something, then you get a spaghetti dinner and a silent auction. 

On the very worst night, hungry and dirty and tired and dispirited, I break down and cry, asking my husband these same questions, tears running down my face and spilling over the telephone. Where are they? Why won’t anyone help me? What about everything I gave to this community?  He is quiet. And then he says, “You didn’t do it to get anything in return.” That is absolutely right. I didn’t do it to get anything in return, and somehow that makes me feel even worse.

In truth, it is his friends that disappoint me the most. Men he worked side by side with for twenty years, every one of them has pretended that they don’t know that I’m in town. They don’t return calls. They don’t come out to the house to see what’s going on. It is a measure of them I did not expect, and it leaves an ugly stain.

My mother, ever the pragmatist, tells me I have to hire someone to help, and I do. The word goes out that I’ll hire as many people as show up for nine bucks an hour, just be at the farm at 2 p.m. One guy turns up, a transplanted east coast carpenter and musician that I’ve known for years.  He laughs at my duct tape belt. I’ve lost so much weight over the last few weeks that I had to fashion it to hold my pants up.

We take a load of furniture and boxes of books to storage. It pours rain, the kind that soaks you to the skin; we stand inside the open door of the storage unit watching it come down in sheets. After the rain abates, and after a few slices of pizza, Alex helps me load the Ohio bound U-Haul trailer with all the things I know I cannot possibly manage on my own: the washer, the antique filing cabinet, a heart pine dresser, Aunt Moe’s Persian carpet. He leaves with his little Saab full of stuff for the community thrift store, and he will come back a few days later to take another load to them. The money I pay him is money well-spent.

Many things leave the house bound for the landfill. The haymaking hard working attorney brings me her horse trailer one Saturday morning and we fill it with garbage and take it to the transfer station where they weigh it and charge me $12. The transfer station attendant pulls a sled out for her grandkids; my friend snags an air-conditioning recharge.  The broken Dogloo and the worn out mohair chair are dumped without ceremony into a giant dumpster, set in a pit at ground level, the roll-off box. I paid more than $100 for the Dogloo; I used to really love that chair. Now I could care less.

Using the volume and weight of the trash that day for comparison, I figure that the amount of garbage I’ve taken from the house must be around 3000 pounds.

Other things leave in an estate sale that runs all day Wednesday without pause. People come to buy dog kennels and crates, an old FIAT convertible half-eaten by mice, tools, trinkets, crockery, the desk where I sat when I learned my father was dead.  I am happy to take their money; there is nothing that they carry away that I am attached to anymore.  It disturbs me that one woman steals things from me; a chain saw, a silver bracelet, whatever else she slipped in her pockets. Walking out to the outbuildings, I’m shocked to see how people have literally thrown things around while going through them. So disrespectful, just to get to that set of socket wrenches or that half empty can of WD-40. It’s hard to fathom what might have been stolen out of the sheds, so I don’t even think about it.

Loading the last of the boxes, the flowerpots, the bathroom scales, the floor lamps onto the trailer as the light fades from the sky, I muse about what makes someplace home. Is it all this stuff I came back for, that I set aside and wrapped and have used to fill every last space in the trailer? It’s a good thing I don’t have a bowling ball left to go in, because there is no room for it. Had the house fallen down where it stood we would have missed a few things we lost, but it is different when you’re standing there with the teacup  (or the letter, or the painting or the spice rack) in your hand.

Is it your history in a place that makes it home? That you can’t go to the grocery without seeing someone you know? That your memories of that intersection or the post office steps or the sound that the doors to the county courthouse make is somehow embedded in your cells, is it that familiarity?  It used to be that I felt like I belonged to this place. I wrote about it, championed it, I knew most of the people in town, and most of the people knew me. Big fish, and all that. It’s not like that anymore. But I don’t think that was what made it home.

Filling the water bottles for the Dog for the long trip home, I am thinking how much I’ll miss the water. Always extra cold, it came from a well hand dug into a spring (with pick axes and shovels the records read) in 1923, and it never ran dry, not even that time we forgot and left it running all day in a horse trough while we went to the movies. It is good, sweet water, perhaps the best I’ve ever had.

I do not number the dogs I am leaving behind. Buried under poppies, under daffodils, under the aspens, under the apple tree. If I stop to think about them, their slender bones wrapped in quilts, and gently bundled into the earth, it will be harder to walk away. If I think about their wagging tails, and eyes, blue and brown, their muzzles cupped in my hand, this place may seize my heart again.

Instead I think about the other dogs, the ones waiting 2000 miles across the Great Plains, and the husband, and the boy. I am overdue there. The Dog settles into the car. As the house has emptied, he seems to understand that we are not staying on there with the ghosts, that we have just come back to pick up a few things.  Gently, gently, pulling a fully laden trailer, I creep up the driveway, hopping out to close the gate behind me one last time. I do not look at the house, or the meadow, or the barns, or the poppies. I just look at the latch and make sure it catches on the ring.

I point the truck to the east and we head for home. A front is blowing in, and by the time we crest the hill out of the town, the sky behind us is black with rain.

The Peculiar Tale of Jimmy Dean Johnson

How a Boy Lay Nameless for 35 Years

This week, a new monument was laid at the grave of “Boy X.” It is a modest stone of red granite, matching the one that has marked this spot in the Dayton Memorial Park since May of 1974. The old one reads “On Behalf of Those Who Cared Boy X Died May 20, 1974.” The new one has a name, and a date of birth and finally answers a mystery nearly three times as old as the boy whose bones lie below.

He was James “Jimmy” Dean Johnson, a handsome sandy-haired boy with a wide smile and big ears that stuck out just a bit. He was born on the 3rd of September 1960, to a woman named Cora Walls. Jimmy must have been among the last of her eight children (six boys, two girls) as when he was just a baby, his mother is said to have stepped out a window during an epileptic seizure. She didn’t die. In fact, she remains alive today, though her mind is clouded with dementia.

In the 1960s epilepsy was considered a non-remitting, progressive disease. Treatments were rudimentary and often not effective. By the time her baby boy was two years old, Mrs. Walls’ children had been placed in foster care. For a period in the early seventies, three of the siblings, Rosie, Wayne and Jimmy, were reunited in the care of their mother’s sister Sarah in Cincinnati. But in 1973, Sarah Zuern left her husband, took her children and moved to Dayton. Her niece and nephews returned to foster care.

This week, little Jimmy’s cousin, Esther Zuern told the Dayton Daily News that she remembered the boy as “sweet; not rowdy or mean like most kids in foster care.” More than one relative recalled that he was small for his age. Nonetheless, Jimmy apparently became something of a “behavior problem” and in a matter of months found himself a resident of the gothic campus at Longview State Hospital. He was just 13.

In March 1974, all hell was breaking loose over Watergate. We were in the clutches of an oil embargo. Terry Jacks’ “Seasons in the Sun” was the number one song. And little Jimmy Dean Johnson walked away from the Longview State Hospital and disappeared into the Ohio streets. His absence was not reported to any authority, and apparently no one ever looked for him.

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The incidents of Monday, May 20, 1974 are not precisely recounted anymore. The coroner’s report is reported as stating that the body of a male child was found at 1853 Stanley St, on a railroad embankment, behind a warehouse. The news media has alternatively reported the body found on the banks of the Great Miami River near Leo and Stanley Streets, at 1383 Stanley; still others say the body lay up against the railroad tracks. Whoever had the unhappy discovery is long forgotten (though no doubt it is etched irrevocably in their own memory.) Perhaps it was a dockworker clocking in on Monday morning. Perhaps it was a brakeman on a passing train, or a beat cop patrolling the area late at night. It doesn’t matter anymore.

What was found was the body of a male child, somewhere between 11 and 14 years old. With sandy hair and ears that stuck out a bit. He had a homemade tattoo on his arm depicting a cross with three teardrops. His skinny little broken body was naked to the elements. He had been beaten and strangled; he was still bound when they found him.

There were no active missing persons cases matching the boy’s description. Ken Betz, the director of the Montgomery County Coroner’s Office told reporters during a February 2009 press conference that records show five different families came to see if the child belonged to them, but none of them could positively identify him. For their sakes, one hopes that some were able to positively say that he was not theirs.

Among those families was Sarah Zuern, who is said to have arrived with a photograph of her nephew, missing from the state hospital in Cincinnati. Sarah’s family claimed she never heard back from the Coroner’s office, but that somehow begs credulity. Even in the seventies a forensic anthropologist could have made a positive identification, a reasonably good medical examiner could have made an almost certain one. Of course, none of the Coroner’s office personnel are the same now as they were thirty-five years ago.

These cases weigh on the men and women that work them. The death of a child is not something easily forgotten, and an unidentified child even more so. No one would have carelessly lost a photograph of a potential match, or overlooked calling the presumed next of kin. But the boy remained nameless, and finally, through the generosity of the community, his small body was buried in Dayton Memorial Gardens under a red granite stone that read “Boy X.”

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Rosie Johnson, Jimmy’s older sister, lives in Alabama now. Last year she saw Jim DeBrosse’s retrospective story in the Dayton Daily News about the mysterious “Boy X” and she wondered, again, if that boy could be her long lost brother. This time she contacted the Montgomery County Coroner’s office.

Jim DeBrosse is owed a great debt in the work he did to help Boy X regain his identity, his history, his belonging. In remembering Boy X and making his readers remember Boy X, he helped to nudge Rosie Johnson to find the answer for her decades-long question about her little brother. His thorough research into who that child was in life is very touching, and his coverage of the family’s memorial to that boy has been remarkable. Every community should have someone like DeBrosse who so eloquently keeps the unidentified lost from being forgotten.

The Coroner’s office took the photograph that Rosie Johnson supplied them, and they took a DNA sample from her. They visited Cora Walls in a nursing home and took a DNA sample there too. They exhumed the body of Boy X, and on January 28, 2009, they had a match.

Ruby Simpkins is the daughter of Sarah Zuern, and the cousin to little Jimmy. She became the focus of media attention during the memorial held in Dayton this week, it seems she is the most readily approachable family member for sound bites and quotes.

She told Jim DeBrosse that the family had held out hope that they’d run into Jimmy somewhere, all grown up, a handsome young man. “But,” she said brightly, “We’ll see him again in heaven.” The television media coverage was upbeat, the anchor pursing her mouth in a little moue at the bittersweet nature of this resolution. A child is murdered, and yet he is at long last returned to his family. Comments to online print stories and websites devoted to missing persons were equally simple-minded. Even the biddies at websleuths.com didn’t seem to get it.

But the Dayton Police Department certainly seems to get it, and Detective Patty Tackett made a statement to the press that the investigation into James Dean Johnson’s murder has been reopened. She urged the public to get in touch if they have any information that may be useful. She added that they are particularly interested in “a situation of sexual assault that may have occurred on a boy of 13—we’d like to have them come forward.” The original autopsy showed no evidence of sexual assault per se, but when a body is found nude, it certainly isn’t ruled out.

The local NBC affiliate carried an interview with Ruby Simpkins in which she offered up a graphic and maudlin vision of her cousin’s death. She imagines him “lying there crying as they beat him,” but “as his spirit slipped away he saw Jesus coming toward him with arms outstretched. Finally, he found the love he’d searched for so long. At last Jimmy’s home!”

Rosie Johnson didn’t make it to Ohio for her brother’s memorial. Sarah Zuern was planning to read a poem at the service, but she slipped away on April 26th. Her obituary lists her age as 73, and notes among her survivors her daughters Esther and Ruby, her sister Cora. It quotes the words spoken with her last breath: “Before she passed on, she said ‘I hope to see you all again someday, in Heaven. I’ll be waiting.’” There is a list of those she expected to find waiting for her in heaven, having been pre-deceased by her ex-husband, three of her special friends, Jesus Christ, (way predeceased by him) and her three sons, James, Johnny and William. Her recently identified, long dead nephew does not merit a mention. Something about the names in Sarah Zuern’s obituary stands out though, something no one seems to have noticed.

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It is the name of her son, William Zuern. William Zuern who was executed by the State of Ohio on June 8, 2004 for the murder of a Hamilton County Sheriff’s deputy, Philip Pence. The deputy was killed while Zuern was incarcerated awaiting trial for the murder of Gregory Earls, an informant who had testified against Zuern’s father. Zuern was angry with prison officials because he didn’t get his full five minutes of telephone time. Authorities had been tipped off that he had a weapon and three of them had gone to search his cell. Zuern got off his bunk naked, and lunged at Deputy Pence, stabbing the officer to death with a 7” shank he’d fashioned from a bucket handle.

William Zuern’s life of crime officially began when he was 13, with the “malicious destruction of property.” He’d gone on a tire-slashing spree in Cincinnati. His 2004  request for clemency details his many brushes with the law, including his juvenile record: burglary, drugs, delinquency, and as adult: theft, felonious assault, murder, murder, murder. On the cover of the Request for Clemency Report, a notation is written neatly, by hand, in the upper right hand corner: EXECUTED 6/8/04

In December of 1973 William Zuern had been released to the care of his mother in Dayton, Ohio. In September 1975, he was remanded to Ohio Youth Services. A photograph displayed by Ken Betz at a press conference shows Jimmy Dean Johnson among the Zuerns: a slight blond boy surrounded by enormous people. William Zuern, at 15, had a significant height and weight advantage over his younger cousin.

Real life homicide is not so much like fictional murder mysteries. Rarely found are those clever twists, those surprising endings where the villain turns out to be the last person you’d suspect. Most of the time the answer to the mystery is the most depressingly obvious one.

Rosie Johnson speculated that perhaps her little brother had headed for Dayton looking for his aunt and cousins.

It appears that he may have found them after all.

A Small Planet, Out of Orbit

Monday was Camille’s birthday, she turned 23. She was five when I met her, an extraordinarily beautiful little girl with hair sticking out in all directions and falling down socks. She is my husband’s younger daughter, but neither of us have had any contact with her for over three years, and then that was just a note of condolence on the death of my father. June will mark four years since we’ve seen her.

As a little girl she was easily amused, and when lifted out of the shadow of her older sister, shone brightly. One birthday brought the requisite Breyer horse, a battery-powered Japanese “pet,” picture books, and a long long rainbow colored ribbon on a short wooden stick. Camille carried the ribbon stick into the yard and spun with it, the ribbon rippling and floating around her. She spun and dance and rippled through the yard, the rainbow leaping and curling. When she finally stopped, she wobbled drunkenly before collapsing in a dizzy giggling heap.

I knew when I started seeing Elmer that there were children in the picture. I’d first met him when he brought his young daughters to the Public Library where I worked. In one of those strange bits of irony, their mother had worked there before me. Three years before she had taken the two girls, then age four and two-and-a-half, and moved out.

Both of the girls were adopted from Korea, but they are not biological siblings. They’d each been about 6 months old when they’d arrived; first Tai and a little less than two years later, Camille. In a newsletter for the inter-country adoption agency, their mother (who is a twin) wrote unabashedly that they’d sought a second baby because she thought her daughter deserved a sister.

Twenty years ago there was still considerable stigma in Korea to having a baby out of wedlock. Most infants, like Tai, were relinquished at birth. Not Camille. Her biological mother struggled stubbornly to keep her, and lasted four months before delivering tiny Jun Ok to an orphanage. In 1992 while combing the agate type section of the results from the Barcelona Olympics, Elmer found listed a South Korean runner, the same unusual name, the same age; further testimony to the tenacity and grit she passed on to her daughter.

Both girls were lovely children, but in terms of temperament they could not have been more different. Camille was stoic and shy and thoughtful, Tai was impulsive and outgoing and dramatic. Camille was content to amuse herself; Tai sought the spotlight.
Tai needed the attention and she demanded it, further casting Camille in the role of someone’s sister. It’s not much of a life, always riding in the backseat.

After Elmer and I married the girls became the subject of an enormous tug of war with his former wife. She wanted more child support. She wanted total control, she wanted me gone, she wanted, she wanted. I’d been a stepchild myself, but never in the midst of anything like that.

Once when the kids had been with us, I’d gone to get my hair cut. The older one got her hair trimmed, and Camille got her first “professional” haircut—nothing extreme, a long pixie cut that didn’t stick out all over. When we returned the girls to their mother for her four days you think we’d had them tattooed or something. It didn’t matter that the girls were thrilled with their new “hair-dos.” We got a letter from the lawyer, proscribing any further haircuts.

Camille’s first grade teacher wanted to hold her back a year. The argument for retaining a child working happily at or above grade level was unclear. The teacher had made a play for Elmer when he was single, maybe that had something to do with it. Elmer insisted that Camille be moved forward and she was.

At the end of the second grade, the issue of retention came up again, and this time it got so ugly we just gave in. The principal seemed to be mystified by the decision, murmuring cryptically that “still waters run deep.” One of the reasons for retention cited by her teacher and mother was Camille’s “small stature.”

Tai had been identified in kindergarten as “talented and gifted.” We worried what kind of message this would send, to be “red-shirted” for the second grade when your sister was regarded as some kind of wunderkind.

Their mother barred me from any input into educational decisions; never mind that three days each and every week I helped them with homework, fed them dinner, gave them baths, tucked them in, read them stories.

Of course, now no one repeats a grade in grammar school. Experts are in nearly unanimous agreement that the experience is more damaging than it is helpful. If Camille hated repeating the second grade, she never showed it. But then, there was so much she never showed.

It wasn’t all Sturm und Drang. There were ballet lessons, swimming lessons, riding lessons. Family photos show the girls happily hiking in the mountains, in front of waterfalls in Yellowstone Park, in the rodeo parade. There are snapshots of raven-haired children hunting for Easter eggs, visiting ghost towns, crying to be let off of the tiny roller coaster at the fair.

There were trips to Disneyland, weekends in Forest Service cabins, crossing Lake Michigan on the ferry, toasting marshmallows on the beach at Spider Lake. Pictures show them at the Field Museum in the shadow of a dinosaur; or at the Shedd Aquarium, noses pressed to the glass. Here they are at the San Diego zoo; in front of Grauman’s Chinese Theatre. This one’s Seattle, where they’re peering up at the Space Needle.

Leafing through photo albums reveals a veritable parade of kids and dogs: here is Camille hanging around the neck of our gentle giant, Chumley; there’s Tai holding cute little Sadie in their arms, both of them lying on the couch draped over Delia the Foxhound.

There are scores of photos of them with their baby brother.

And Christmas, always too much Christmas. One of my closest friends was with us one Christmas morning and she still recounts how overwhelmed the girls were wading through the packages, so much so that they hardly responded at all to the stacks of gifts.

There are the photos of Camille doing the Macarena in a local production of Aladdin. Here’s one of Camille with a gaggle of girls at her swimming birthday party at Chico Hot Springs. This is Camille lacing on ice skates. And Halloween! Here’s Camille as a black kitty cat, a ladybug, a horse with an enormous papier-mache head.

Camille’s love of horses was legendary. From My Little Pony to My Friend Flicka, she adored them all. If there was a pony ride, she was on it. Breyer model horses lined her bookshelves, interspersed with horse books of every size and shape. She had a horse themed birthday party with a horse-shaped cake, horse-y favors, and many little girls clambering up on our old patient palomino for a walk around the pasture.

One autumn I won a fellowship from the Montana Arts Council, a considerable sum of money. I used most of it to buy what I thought (having been horse-mad once myself) would be the most perfect Christmas present ever for Camille: a Welsh pony. She was very pretty, white with a perfect little Arab-style head, tiny ears, big brown eyes; and she was 11 years old, exactly the same as Camille. She was delivered on Christmas Eve and we hid her away in a box stall in the barn.

On Christmas morning Camille unwrapped a tiny lavender and turquoise halter that wouldn’t have fit anything on the place. She looked baffled.

“Maybe you should see if you can find something it will fit,” I suggested. We all put on coats and hats and tramped through the snow to the barn. I think she was thrilled, but who knows. I had visions of her spending hours brushing and combing the pony, taking long idyllic rides, braiding the pony’s hair.

But those were my memories from my life and it didn’t work out that way. The next day Camille took the pony for a ride. About 100 yards from the barn she fell off when the pony startled and she never rode her again. In the end, she didn’t even look at her.

I’d made a mistake. As a child I had loved horse books, and toy horses and horse pictures as a fill-in for the real thing. Camille just loved toy horses; she wasn’t really interested in having a living, breathing pony of her own.

By this time Camille was coming by herself to spend time with her father. We had come to an impasse with her older sister and insisted that she get therapy. Her mother had not agreed. We said Tai couldn’t come to stay with us until she got the help she needed. That was a mistake, too. We’ve could have done an end-run on the therapy thing, but we were tired of fighting.

In the sixth grade, Camille grew absolutely silent. I’d pick her up from school on Thursday afternoons and the ten-mile ride to the farm often passed without much comment. It went like this:

“How are you?”

“Fine.”

“How’s school going?”

“Okay.”

“Anything interesting happen today?”

“Not really.”

Maybe it was puberty. Maybe it was some permutation of the attachment disorder that affects so many foreign adoptees. Whatever it was, eventually I just gave up, and we rode in silence.

The many friends she’d had as a child had dropped away one by one. She would still talk with her little brother, but most of the time she withdrew to some other place. One Friday night, her father went into town to pick her up at a middle school dance. She had begged us to let her go. Elmer asked her if she’d had a good time. She was silent. When he asked again, thinking perhaps she hadn’t heard him, she burst into tears.

“It was awful,” she sobbed. Not only had no one asked her to dance, not a single person had spoken to her all night long.

She was still crying when they got home and when I asked what was wrong, Elmer filled me in. But Camille had something to say too, now that she was allowing herself to vent.

“I don’t know why I have to come here every week,” she screamed. “I don’t know why I can’t just live with my mother.” Elmer and I looked at each other.

“Go get your stuff, honey,” I said, “your father will take you home.” And he did. And she never lived with us again. That was probably a mistake too. We probably should have said “Because we love you and because we think it is good for you to have your father in your life.” We should have hung on; instead we let her go because that’s what we thought she wanted.

After she moved out, my mother and I were cleaning out under the bed. We found the usual stuff you might expect under the bed of a 14-year old girl. There were 7-up cans, a book ruined where something got spilled on it, panties stained with menstrual blood, all manner of paper, including some pages that looked like they’d been ripped from a journal. One of them was full of rage and fury, mostly directed at me, and the worst invective she could come up with was “stupid lesbian dyke bitch.” The other entry was how thrilled she was that we were going to Disneyland again.

Through High School we didn’t see much of Camille. We all made a trip to Missoula and I suggested she choose the restaurant for dinner. She chose a Japanese place and although her father and her brother and her sister had to tiptoe around the menu, she and I had a good time.

Her sister knew how to work the system. We could go for months without hearing from either of them, but just before Tai’s birthday, or Christmas, contact would be suddenly renewed. Tai lobbied for a car for her 18th birthday, and she lobbied hard. When the birthday arrived we all went to dinner to celebrate. We gave her a Matchbox car. The next little package she unwrapped contained a key to a 16-year-old Mercedes sitting in the parking lot. I’d snuck out (“Just have to get something out of the car!”) to stick the balloons to the antenna.

We figured we’d give Camille a car too, when she turned 18, but she never learned to drive. She did well in high school, her grades were excellent, she spent a lot of time drawing and painting. One of her pieces was in a show at a local gallery; I used it to accompany a story on the exhibit opening. If she was pleased with that, she never said.

Elmer and I went to Lethbridge, Alberta one weekend. The University there was said to have a strong arts program and it was good value given the difference between the Canadian and American dollars. At 350 miles away it was closer than some in-state schools. Lethbridge has a large Asian community and we thought Camille might feel some sense of connection there, instead of one of just a handful of Asians. Her mother wanted her to go to a Junior College in Powell, Wyoming (180 miles away) and it was to Powell she went.

Graduation came and went without notice or invitation. Father’s Day came and went without a word. Elmer met with her to fill out some paperwork that would allow her to collect a thousand dollar scholarship, a benefit offered by his employer. He took her to dinner at a Mexican restaurant (her choice) and as she did every time she went out to eat from the time she was a little girl, Camille ordered the most expensive thing on the menu.

We didn’t really see her again until her older sister got married in Iowa. Tai had asked her father to walk her down the aisle, so Tai’s mother had declined to attend, and Camille came out to Iowa alone. It was June and hotter than, well, it was hot. The wedding was set for late in the afternoon, (when the day is at its hottest, naturally) and when we drove up from Des Moines, we found the bride fuming in the church kitchen and that the number one bridesmaid (that would be Camille) locked in a tiny bathroom in the church basement. We could hear her sobbing from outside the door.

Tai’s soon-to-be mother-in-law was tapping on the door, talking through it, negotiating.

“What’s going on?” I asked.

“We’ve got it under control,” is what she said, but what she meant was “Butt out.”

I almost did. But then I remembered that little girl and her rainbow ribbon. I remembered reading themThe Animal Family, remembered them listening raptly. I remembered them laughing together at Disneyland. I remembered their tenderness with their baby brother.

“Could you move out of the way, please,” I said to the mother-in-law. I wasn’t asking. “Camille, it’s Larkin. Would you let me in please, I just want to talk to you.” She unlocked the door; I stepped in and we locked the door again. She had tossed her John Deere green and yellow satin dress on the floor and was sitting on the john in the most amazing bustier I’d seen.

“Wow,” I said. “That’s a great, um, whatever that is.” Camille grinned through her tears. So we sat there in a bathroom the size of a closet in the stifling heat talking about what a butthead her sister could be.

In the end, she put on her dress, washed her face, put her makeup back on, went and stood next to her sister, actually smiled and had fun for the rest of the weekend. Before we left, I gave Camille a little pendant, a circle of diamond chips and sapphires set in sterling. I told her when I gave it to her that I hoped that she would remember every time she saw it of the continuity of the family circle. I wonder if she still has it.

At Junior College, Camille met a guy who convinced her to drop out and marry him. We weren’t invited or even informed. Tai told us that Camille is angry with us because we didn’t buy her a car (though she never learned to drive) and she is angry with us because we didn’t give her money for her wedding (which we knew nothing about at the time.) Sometimes you can’t win for losing.

Once I had a little money, I thought maybe we should give her some, even up the score with her sister. (Of course I had forgotten about the pony, and the scholarship money and the orthodontia . . . ) But she didn’t return her father’s phone call. And then the money went, as money will, for something else.

Camille doesn’t talk to her sister anymore either. They had a falling out after Camille told Tai that her children will burn in hell because they weren’t baptized in the Baptist church, merely christened in the Methodist church. I guess her fellow is of the speaking-in-tongues, serpent-handling, holy-rolling variety of Baptists.

I don’t understand people who elect to leave their families. My own stepsister had a very fractious relationship with her father, and she would take long sabbaticals, but she always came back, even the one last time to speak at his funeral. I remember my stepfather dancing with Elmer’s little girls at my wedding. He was miserably sick with shingles, but there he was out on the dance floor, one little girl on each hand. Our family stories are interwoven, we become are our own little universe.

Last summer, a birthday card from Camille addressed to her mother’s sister was mis-delivered to our house in Montana. Elmer was furious. It has been years since Camille acknowledged his birthday or mine or her brother’s. But here she was sending a card to her aunt. He was ready to turn his back for good. But you can’t do that to your youngest daughter, I told him, not to the twirler of rainbows, the girl who could write in perfect mirror-writing cursive, the most expensive dinner date ever. You have to hang in there.

So every Christmas and every birthday that come we send her something. Sometimes it isn’t much; there have been some lean years. A little cash, a trinket or watercolor block or a scarf, and a card that says we love her. We don’t know where she is. We heard that she works in a pet store in Billings, Montana. Maybe that’s true. I hope she’s happy wherever she is. We just send it to her in care of her mother.

We did our best. Was it good enough? I don’t know. Did we make mistakes? Of course. People make mistakes. I hope that one day she will choose to come back into the fold. I hope that when that day comes that it won’t be too late.

That little girl, I still keep her in my heart. Twirling in the late afternoon sun, a small planet all her own, spinning, slightly wobbly, out of orbit.

The Thinking Man

an endorsement

Often, when an endorsement is written, there’s a little disclaimer at the end of it – in fine print– revealing that the writer has some other, additional relationship with the subject of the piece.

Given the manner in which David Esrati approaches the hail of ideas, people, conundrums and opportunities that come flying at him each and every day, it is more appropriate to put that disclaimer right here at the beginning, right up front where everyone can see it:  I know the man.  And the “how” of that says much about the extraordinary person that he is.

A year ago this spring I wrote an essay about the discovery of the body of a young woman, Heather Walker, in a trashcan on Dayton’s east side.  I found that David Esrati had also made mention of the murder on his own website www.esrati.com, and referenced a long ago controversial Esquire magazine cover by George Lois of a woman in a trashcan. There are plenty of websites that feature crime; it remains a compelling subject for many readers. Fewer are those that mention an erudite magazine in the same breath.  I left a comment on Esrati’s site and included a link to my own piece.

It wasn’t long before I heard back. David Esrati suggested lunch, but I was literally leaving town the next day for the whole summer and had to put him off until the fall.

I had been back in Dayton just a few days when he got in touch again: he had not forgotten.  After agreeing to lunch, I did a little research. I found a photograph of David Esrati in a black ninja-style hood at a City Commission meeting, and an account of his arrest. I dug further in court records and found an opinion by the Second Appellate Court. It made for fascinating reading.

Esrati had appeared in the hood at a Commission meeting in February 1997 to protest secret closed meetings the Commission had been holding to discuss eliminating public comment at Commission meetings. 

Federal and state “sunshine” laws require that all meetings and records of public regulatory bodies be announced, and open to the public. There are a few well-delineated exceptions to this, generally in instances where a person’s right to privacy is at stake – the performance review of a city employee, for instance. Removing the public’s right to comment would not have fallen under the very narrow strictures that allow for closed meetings.

David Esrati donned the hood at that meeting in silent protest, and was ordered arrested by then Dayton Mayor (and current US Republican Congressman) Mike Turner and was charged with four misdemeanors, all of which were later dismissed by the Municipal Court.

At great expense to taxpayers, the City of Dayton appealed to the Second Appellate District Court of Appeals, who affirmed the lower court’s decision and dismissed the case with prejudice. The City of Dayton again appealed, this time to the Ohio State Supreme Court, who declined to hear the case. The opinion stood affirming David Esrati’s constitutional right to freedom of expression and asserting that Mayor Mike Turner had lied under oath about the incidents of the meeting.

As a journalist, Esrati’s protest interested me. Not just because it made for good copy, and not just because it allowed one overblown politician to be hoisted by his own petard, caught on the hook of his own lies. Not just because  the sunshine laws are near and dear to my heart. But rather because open meetings are of essential importance to ensure fair governance. Still, I’m not sure I would have gone to jail for them.

I was late for our lunch meeting (the garage door wouldn’t close) and arrived flustered. Everyone in the room seemed to know Esrati. He pointed out various people and their respective roles in Dayton as movers and shakers. Some waved, others looked away frostily. Over the course of lunch we talked about Dayton, and how I’d managed to land there. I’d much rather be the interviewer than the interviewed and I was ill prepared.

Still, regardless of what David Esrati thought he saw before him (a somewhat rumpled middle-aged woman who wrote well and talked too fast, perhaps) I know that he saw this: a potential resource for his own business (a remarkably sophisticated marketing firm The Next Wave) and two “problems” to solve.

How much money is there to be made in writing about crime? he asked.

Not much, I admitted.

Had I met many people here yet?

No, not really I said.

He thought he might be able to find me some job-writing gigs. He also had some ideas as to how I might meet kindred souls in Dayton.

This is how David Esrati works. He wants to fix things. In ad agency parlance, he’d be The Idea Man. He has a keen sense for what might not be working quite as well as it could, and he has ideas, not just for better widgets, but for better schools, better economies, better government. But we are getting ahead of ourselves here. First to address the matter at hand:

David Esrati is running for City Commission.

Dayton, a city of 160,000, is governed by a four-member City Commission, with Mayor Rhine McLin at the helm and a largely invisible city manager in the works. Only one commissioner, Dean Lovelace, survives from the 1997 lawsuit debacle. The two commissioners who vie with Esrati for the two open seats are Joey Williams and Nan Whaley. 

Williams is a black man, a senior Vice President for Chase Bank and a second term member of the Commission who has been somewhat decried as “spineless” for abstaining from the vote on contentious topics.

Nan Whaley, freshman commissioner, is as whitebread as her Indiana upbringing. Lacking much in the way of real world experience, she is a fervent proponent of “landbanking” which many rightfully fear paves the way to seizure of property by eminent domain. She is a student at Wright State University.

The Commission’s Mission is stated as follows : “As stewards of the public trust, our mission is to provide leadership, excellent services, and participatory government to enhance the quality of community for all who live, work, raise families, play, or conduct business in Dayton.”

While the mission statement is fairly standard boilerplate adopted by commissioners in many American cities, it is the Commission’s “Vision” statement that is frighteningly rudderless and confused: “Dayton is a community where people choose to live, work, play, and raise families.  We serve as a regional leader and resource in offering cutting-edge services to our many customers.”

While Dayton is certainly a community where people live, work and play (would there be a community without that?)  this struggling city can’t be considered a “regional leader,” given it’s locale less than 70 miles from Columbus and Cincinnati, cities that really do “lead” the region.

The precise definition of a “resource in offering cutting-edge services to our many customers” is a mystery. One wonders who are the customers of this city, and what “cutting-edge services” are they being offered. This is Dayton’s official “vision.” No wonder we’re in trouble.

“I’m running to make Dayton a better place,” Esrati says  “where we can have an intelligent conversation out in the open about how to solve our problems.” He has a pretty firm grip on what ails Dayton and its government.

When asked what he thought are the three biggest problems facing Dayton, he went not to the nut and bolt answers that most would: jobs, economy, development. Those are issues that every city faces. Instead, his answers went to the heart of Dayton’s problem. The city, he says, is plagued by its poor self-image.

“It’s our perception of ourselves,” he explains. “No one is going to believe in Dayton until we do.”  He points out that the public’s perception of Dayton Public Schools is largely misinformed, and that the local media does tremendous damage by playing up every crime story, even those as penny ante as stolen holiday decorations or a convenience store break-in.

David Esrati believes that the problems in city government hinge largely on a climate of reactive politics instead of pro-active decision-making. He is unhappy with Priority Boards, which he believes disenfranchises the voter and adds another layer of bureaucracy with which the public contends. He would like to see better delivery of basic services and a feedback mechanism through which the public could effectively communicate their concerns with their elected representatives.

“I believe we need to re-task the City Commission as a board of directors who must keep the City Manager focused and on mission, with clear goals and objectives. However, that which you don’t measure, you can’t improve and without some kind of tracking system for complaints and requests, we can’t even start making the kind of changes we need to see if we want to make Dayton great again,” he explains.

A long time champion of Dayton, Esrati’s platform is plainly available through his website where he comments daily (sometimes more often) on issues confronting our community. Through the forum, he has already engaged the community in an often-lively debate about the challenges the city faces, but it is a far cry from doom and gloom. Indeed, some of the nicest things ever said about Dayton, and the people that call this city home, and the businesses, fledgling and otherwise that take root here are among the entries on Esrati’s blog.

He gets some ribbing for his ego, but nothing of worth was ever achieved by sad sacks. David Esrati’s Achilles’ heel is not his arrogance so much as that he sometimes forgets to sell himself, playing up his struggles more than his considerable achievements.

The Next Wave is where Esrati spends most of his waking hours and the work he does there is exceptionally fine; he has a knack for making stuff look good. His philosophy as a businessman carries over well into political currency.

~From the Next Wave website:

We had a different vision: The Next Wave is here to help people stay ahead of the competition, not abreast of it. We actually study marketplaces and people and buying habits, and we create a brand experience that is bigger than just advertising. We do it by finding honest positions that our clients can own and that set them apart from the standard price-and-product, dog-eat-dog world of mediocre advertising that tries to sell something rather than build value in the consumer’s mind and the client’s balance sheet.

David Esrati can do a lot for Dayton with those same skills. He understands what appeals to people, and how to create desire for a particular kind of experience. Those talents and his experience would be invaluable assets to helping Dayton pull itself up by the bootstraps.

Unlike many of Dayton’s critics, Esrati is quick with a list of what makes Dayton vibrant. He grins as he recounts them: “We’ve got a lot of water, a temperate climate, a great location. We aren’t in an area known for devastating natural disasters.  We have a reasonable cost of living, a decent cultural scene, something for almost everybody. We’re a diverse city, with great post-secondary educational opportunities and a tech-driven work force.”  He pauses for a minute and then adds. “And people are nice here. Not fake nice, but genuinely nice.”

There’s probably nothing on which David Esrati doesn’t have an opinion. I don’t agree with his philosophy on the Death Penalty, for instance, but it seems unlikely that he’d have the opportunity to implement it from the City Commission. He is passionate for education, and for the arts, for economic development, and historic preservation and for justice. Oh, and ice hockey. 

 The son of a journalist, he has been schooled from birth on the importance of education, information and rights, both civil and human. David Esrati has a tendency to call people out on their bad decisions. Maybe that’s not popular, but it is essential. There’s already too much laissez-faire in the city government.He sees clearly through the Oz-like machinations that so many politicians engage in.

Yes, he can be abrasive. But you know that under the bluster is a rock solid support, a dependable man, a thinking man who will put Dayton’s best interests first. It will take vision and creativity and ingenuity to help get Dayton back on the right path. In a place that prides itself on being a city of originals, no one could be better suited to serve than David Esrati.

Writer’s Block

I haven’t written anything in weeks. For awhile there, the writing was a daily ritual, and missing a day left me feeling like I’d done something dreadful: forgotten the baby in the shopping cart, or neglected to feed the dog, or change my undies. It was as regular as breathing.

Then I missed a day. Or two. Or three. Nothing awful happened. Occasionally kind people rang up and said, “Where are your stories?” It was nice to know they cared. I wrote some more. Then I went on a trip most of the way across the country. I packed the laptop, thought I’d carve out time for myself to scratch out a few thousand words each day. Who was I kidding? I wrote not a thing.

One of the worst fights I ever had with my father was ostensibly about writer’s block. We were sitting in a wonderful restaurant (now gone) in Livingston, Montana. It was the former Bucket of Blood Saloon that had been carefully and lovingly made over into an establishment of the highest order by the esteemed writer and painter Russell Chatham.

It was my favorite restaurant ever, anywhere. It was a folded linen napkin sort of place, but not stuffy. This piece is not about the restaurant, though. I am wandering. My father, an English professor, was in town for a visit, and we’d gone to the Bar and Grille and had a wonderful dinner: carpaccio, salad caprese, roast duck and a really good Cabernet, or two. 

He is telling us that he thinks my 6-year-old son should take lessons in the martial arts. My husband and I look at each other and smile a bit. This is a topic we’ve discussed.

“Well,” say I, “we’ve talked about it but we think it would just give Julian an excuse to kick people.”  My father, out of the blue, quietly explodes in front of us.

“Well, it would give him some self-discipline,” he hisses. “Something you never had.”

It wouldn’t have surprised me more if he’d reached across the table and slapped me. In those days I wrote copiously for a local weekly, turning out all manner of stuff from investigative reports on murders to groundbreaking ceremonies for new bank branches, a survey of Thanksgiving traditions to the nitty gritty of the police blotter, with book reviews and a personal column thrown in for good measure.

“I write more than 5000 words a week for publication,” I tell my father, tears welling in my eyes. “That takes a little self-discipline.”

“I want some respect!” he roars back. And so I get up and walk out, trying to get out the door before I start sobbing.

It was my mother who unraveled the mystery for me. She understood that I was defending myself with my declaration of  weekly achievement. She also saw that my father, from whom she was long divorced, saw my statement as a dig. “He has a hard time finishing anything—articles, essays, the Berryman book,” she said. “He thought you were throwing that in his face.”

My father is gone now. We never really discussed what happened in the Livingston Bar and Grille that night, though I did address it once in an email in the last months of his life. I told him that I was just trying to defend myself and that there was no insult, subtle or otherwise, intended for him. He didn’t respond to that, perhaps he didn’t even remember the incident.

But when I was sorting through his office at the University, I saw why he had never finished the book on John Berryman. He began in 1970. Berryman leapt to his death from a Minneapolis bridge in January of 1972; it would have been an ideal time to publish a book about the poet. In Dad’s office there were two filing cabinet drawers filled with material about Berryman: poems analyzed down to their last syllable. I asked Dad, then speechless from laryngeal cancer, what to do with the files. “Pitch them,” he scribbled on a legal pad. I did pitch some of them, but I packed up just as many and carried them home.

They stand in their boxes, not just in homage, but also as a cautionary tale. I, too, fall so easily into the research trap.  The research is fun, the quest for the unknown, the thrill of discovery. I have my own 20-year-old book project in file folders. At some point you have to stop researching and start writing, but by then, you’re so deep into the research that you don’t even know where to start.

But that’s not exactly the kind of block I’ve had lately. You know how it is when you wake up in the morning after strenuous activity the day before and you don’t even really want to move, because you know its going to hurt? It’s more like that. That famous scene in Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining where Jack Nicholson has typed the same sentence thousands of times onto reams of manuscript paper, that made my heart ache. Not because it was showing that he was losing his mind, or that he was about to become a murderous killer, but because I understood. It is the ultimate spinning of wheels: All Work and No Play Makes Jack a Dull Boy.

It isn’t that I don’t have anything to write about. I have a list of stuff I want to write about, plan to write about. I interviewed a local figure here a few weeks ago—no, it’s at least a month. He’s running for City Council. He’s a fan of my work and I know he’s been wondering where the hell the piece is. But I couldn’t write it. Not in these last weeks, it would have read like it was written with a stubby crayon. I was like a literary drunk, couldn’t put one word in front of the other.

Opening lines come to me in dreams. And closing lines. But I never even open up the word processing application on the printer—the modern equivalent to rolling the paper under the platen of a typewriter. I’ve had no blank sheet to stare at, because I have simply looked away. I’ve played hours of Snood (one of Dad’s favorite pastimes too, as it happened) I list stuff on eBay and track it from hour to hour, minute to minute. I read the news from many different major papers from different corners of the globe. I participate in forums. I wander around the kitchen looking for something to nosh on and then I come back, sit down and log on to Facebook.

Today, a good friend of mine, a writer, a woman with three young daughters who gets up at five in the morning (so she has time to write) told me that she had signed up to Facebook just to keep up with me. I was so ashamed. I know she didn’t mean for me to feel ashamed, but I did. I felt like a fraud. Writer! Feh! Who am I kidding? I am a dabbler, a dilettante, a pretender.

And yet….

When the words come they are like cool water on a tear stained face. The pages fill with word after word that not only march along together in formation, sometimes they dance like Alvin Ailey across the page. Sometimes they lift off like herons rising from the wood. And sometimes they plod along like little tired children, but at least they move. Those are the good hours. Those are the times that I feel light, energetic, even, dare I say it, immortal. This is not to say that the writing is easy. It isn’t. Sometimes you have to wrangle sentences as unruly as broncs and just as dangerous. Sometimes more dangerous. It’s nearly impossible to stop until I’m finished and sometimes the sun has gone down and come up again before the last bit of punctuation hits the page. It’s a weird combination of exhilaration and exhaustion to finish. My poor husband: I’ve woken him up many nights to have him talk me down so that I can sleep.

I don’t think it’s like this for everyone.

It isn’t like this for me every time. The more pedantic pieces don’t consume me so much, but they don’t give so much in return either. Yes, its fun to write about weird McDonald’s commercials, but it’s kind of like eating McDonald’s food, it doesn’t really sustain me. On the other hand, I can no more write every essay from the core of my very being any more than I could survive while bleeding all over the pages, and honestly, who would want to read a steady diet of that?

There’s a funny story about William Faulkner, who before he became a literary lion worked as a screenwriter in Hollywood. He too suffered from Writer’s Block—spending too many interesting evenings at cocktail parties, screenings, the Brown Derby.  Finally, after a particularly frustrating day trying to write at the studio, he told Howard Hawks that he was having a hard time concentrating and that he was going to go home to write. Hawks said fine, and a few days later he checked in at the hotel to see how Faulkner was coming with the script. “Oh, Mr. Hawks,” the desk clerk said, “Mr. Faulkner checked out on Monday.” He had returned home- to Mississippi- to write.

Maybe that’s my problem. I don’t have a door on my study (a soon to be remedied situation) – and I am more productive late at night when the dogs and cats and child and husband have curled in their respective beds.  The television is silent. But on the other hand I am used to writing in a newspaper office with phones ringing and an offset press running in the next room. I have had private offices, solitude galore, where I did not write a lick.

My friend Rose (not a writer) says I should relax and let it flow and she’s more right than she knows. But it’s easier said than done. On the Internet (oh the wonderful, horrible, fantastic and terrible Internet, waster of time, master of research tools) there are all kinds of helpful people wanting to cure my writer’s block.

Drink coffee. Exercise. Dance. Listen to music. Eat healthy snacks. Yadda yadda yadda. We know all those things, don’t we? I’ve got my coffee cup. I’m listening to the Afro Cuban All Stars, music that can be incredibly conducive to writing, and yet. (Wait, you say, you’re writing this, aren’t you? And yes, but this isn’t really writing. This is like a pianist playing scales or a skater warming up, a painter cleaning brushes. This is the writing you do when you are getting ready to do some writing.) It’s a damn good thing I’m not Scheherazade… a thousand stories indeed, I’d have been dead a month ago.

I know what I have to do, and this is a start. I have to make deadlines for myself and I have to Honor Those Deadlines.  Oh, yes, and that other thing.

Just.

Put.

One.

Word.

After.

Another.

 

And make them dance.

Give Me That Fish

Sometimes you just have to write about the mundane. You find you just don’t have the wherewithal to write about sadness or faith or even the last thing left in Pandora’s box: hope. What is left then is either a blank canvas and hours wasted noodling around because you know you need to write, but you’re not strong enough for writing your heart. That’s when you write about McDonald’s instead.

Unless you’ve been in a cave since sometime-before-Mardi-Gras, you’ve seen the ad. If you’re like most Americans, you probably know every word to the jingle. Love it or hate it, McDonald’s Lenten season commercial for their Filet-o-Fish sandwich has achieved a kind of pop culture status that the Super Bowl spots only dream of.

Easter has come and gone, Lent’s been over for weeks and McDonald’s has ended the promotion, yet people still crave the singing fish. Views of the multiple listings for the spot on Youtube topped two million last week and continue to climb; the first one posted garnered 10,000 views in the first hours it was available.

Since it appeared, Freddy the Fish’s 15 seconds of fame has been parlayed into mashups and remixes by DJs , it’s being played in clubs, there are parodies, children sing it, cats sing it, hell, I even sing it. (Not on Youtube, though, you’ll be glad to know.) You can get the jingle as a ringtone for your cell phone.

 

Give me  back that Filet-o-Fish

Give me that fish

Give me back that Filet-o-Fish

Give me that fish

What if it were you hanging

up on this wall?

If it were you in that sandwich

you wouldn’t be laughing at all….

 

When they were looking for a way to promote the fish sandwich during this year’s Lenten season, McDonald’s turned to Arnold, a Boston ad agency. (You can blame them for the Carnival Cruise beach ball ads, along with “Powered by Tyson” and spots for Ocean Spray.) The catch? (Sorry.) The same spot had to work for both English and Spanish-speaking markets.

Pete Harvey, senior ad man at the agency, gave them “Freddy the Fish.” (For the Spanish markets, the piscine star was presented as “Pepe de Pescado.”) Brainstorming in the aptly named “Fish Bowl” conference room, one staffer recalled a decade-old hit novelty item “Billy the Big-Mouthed Bass,” an animatronic rubber fish that sang “Don’t Worry, Be Happy” and “Take Me to the River” when passersby set off the motion sensor.

Though Freddy bears more than a passing resemblance to Billy, he is actually a real fish, a pollack, prepared by a Los Angeles taxidermist. (Both pollack and cod are used in the Filet-o-Fish, but the crew decided that the cod was “too scary looking.”) Freddy’s head and tail are activated by remote control. Nonetheless, Gemmy Industries, the manufacturers of the original Billy, were flattered by the imitation. One of their veeps sent a thank you note to McDonalds, and they are introducing a recordable Billy Bass that will be sold through Cabela’s, and a Billy Bass app for your iPhone.

The agency supplied the lyrics to the New York music production company, Pulse Music and composer Josh Peck sent back seven different interpretations of Freddy’s song.  Just before presenting the last variation Peck told the firm “We don’t think you’ll go with this one, it’s the most weird.”  That techno-meets-garage-band sound (“the most weird”) was the unanimous favorite.

“It was the one everyone wanted to hear over and over again,” Pete Harvey told USA Today. “There’s more risk with jingles, but also more reward.”  In scouting out a location, a garage was found that had a Billy Bass already mounted on the wall: they had found the right spot. Ray Conchado, the actor who plays the head-bobbing man eating the sandwich, said he started out eating the whole sandwich with each take. After a few takes, he learned to just take a bite.  J.R. Reed, who portrays the dumbstruck friend returning a borrowed drill, gets the most comment at our house. “The look on that guy’s face is just great,” my husband has said each and every time we’ve seen the spot.  Or even just when talking about it.

Give me that fish.

Every year McDonald’s sells 300 million Filet-o-Fish sandwiches, and twenty-five percent of those are sold during Lent, the forty-day period between Ash Wednesday and Easter during which many devout Roman Catholics give up eating meat.  McDonald’s isn’t the only fast food giant to cash in on this fish-selling opportunity; every chain from Burger King (BK Big Fish replaced the long standing “Whaler” a few years ago) to Rally (Deep Sea Double) to Arby’s (and their touted “fish shaped” sandwich) is in on the act.  As you might expect, the regular fishmongers like Long John Silver and Captain D.’s really step up their ad campaigns too.

We’re not Catholic; we give up nothing for Lent. (I’d be happy to give up housekeeping and overcooked vegetables, but I guess that’s not really in the proper spirit of the thing.) But we do eat more fish in March, and that is due in some small part to the McDonald’s Filet-o-Fish promotions.  Though my husband was pretty upbeat about Rally’s Deep Sea Double, I wasn’t impressed. The fish squares were dry and had a kind of bitter aftertaste. They were too crunchy, and the cheese, well, I don’t know. I just didn’t care for it.

In fact, I generally can’t abide fast food fish. (Yes, I confess, I’m one of those peculiar people that peel the batter off the shrimp.) But that particular combination of the Filet-o-Fish: a tender square of fish, a bit of tartar sauce, a little cheese assembled tidily on (and this is the important part) a steamed bun.  A remarkable number of consumers complain that McDonald’s only puts half a slice of cheese on the Filet-o-Fish. Hello? They’ve only put half a slice of cheese on the sandwich since 1982, when most of the malcontents hadn’t even been born yet.

It’s less a cost-cutting measure than a means to reduce the calorie and fat content in a sandwich that some people might choose as a healthier option to the Big Mac. You could do worse in that respect, the sandwich weighs in (sorry) at 350 calories, 16 grams of protein and 16 grams of fat. An odd side notes here is that two diet websites list the calorie/fat count of the Filet-o-Fish at 450cal/26g and 380cal/18g but those are anomalies, most independent sites agree with McDonald’s own nutritional analysis.

The phenomenon of Freddy the singing fish’s popularity generated a considerable amount of press, not just in trade journals like Brandweek, but also in the “generalist” newspapers, like USA Today and in all manner of websites. Many of them include comment sections, and the comments have run the gamut from “I can’t stand this commercial, I turn the channel every time it comes on” to “I love this! It’s my ringtone.”  (And complaints about the half slice of cheese.)

The real puzzle in the comment section is the invective that pops up fairly regularly. They’re not just critical of McDonald’s, they are screeds: apoplectic rants about the American institution, and its sandwiches. Do vegetarians write them? Sometimes. Are they written by animal rights activists? Probably. Are they written by former employees—some of them, without a doubt. Why do these people even read articles about singing fish commercials if they are going to make their blood pressure go through the roof? It would be less deleterious to their health if they just had a couple of Big Macs and chilled.

It made me think of the Internet rumour a good friend sent me a few months ago, urging me to boycott McDonald’s in a show of support for American cattlemen. The rumour purported that McDonald’s was going to be buying uninspected South American beef, raised on pastures that used to be rainforest, cutting into the livelihoods of ranchers across this fair land. Most of the other big burger chains (Burger King and Wendy’s predominantly) do use South American beef. (And all beef, imported and domestic, in this country is inspected, so that part was just a bugaboo.)

McDonald’s is the single largest buyer of U.S. beef, its not surprising that American cattle producers would be worried that the chain was looking elsewhere for their patties. The problem, according to McDonald’s, is not that there isn’t enough beef produced in the U.S. but because most of the beef here is grain-fed, there is not enough lean beef available here. Therefore, McDonald’s began importing grass-fed beef from Australia and New Zealand; those imports account for about ten percent of the beef they use in this country.

Unlike most other fast food chains, McDonalds has become the standard bearer in environmental conservation. (When they gave up Styrofoam use, it cut Styrofoam demand in this country in half and rainforest conservation via their refusal to use South American beef.) They were among the first to provide better nutritional choices and full disclosure of nutritional analysis.  In philanthropic endeavors, they provide 6,000 bedrooms every night for families of ill children through nearly 300 Ronald McDonald houses (serving more than a million families every year) and through Ronald McDonald House charities, providing hundreds of millions of dollars in grants and program services to benefit children worldwide. 

Because they are so ubiquitous and because every McDonald’s in America can be mapped on their website, they have also become a cog in the vast network that compromises dog rescue and the transport system that makes it work, not just for pure breed rescues, but for shelters across the country in their efforts to place dogs. You’d think people could find something more worthwhile to be enraged about.

We stop at McDonald’s pretty routinely. My father made McDonald’s his regular stop for pee breaks, and when we’re traveling we do the same. When my son was little he and I used to go through the local Drive-thru after school for an order of French fries to share. When I was little you used to be able to go to McDonald’s, get a hamburger, fries and a coke and still get change back for your dollar. I even remember the commercial for it. “Sir? You forgot your change.”  The greatest food? No, probably not. Maybe the most reliable fast food, though, and always, always, the comfort of the familiar.  My Mom usually ordered the Filet-o-Fish.

 

Halfway Through the Wood

for Doug on the loss of his Dad, and in loving memory of  Larry Vonalt.

Last week we attended the funeral of a man we’d never met. I could not have told you much at all about him. I was four states and 900 miles away when I learned of his death. My husband read the obituary to me over the telephone, both of us learning that this gentleman had served in two wars, worked for the telephone company, he was 82, and he’d been married for 56 years. In addition to his wife, he is survived by four children, four grandchildren, a brother, a sister. While recounting the news of his death to my mother, tears spill down my face.

No, we’d never met Edsel Peters. If we’d seen him working in his yard or fishing at the lake, we would not have recognized him. But we mourn his passing because his youngest child, his baby boy, is our good and loyal friend. The kind of friend that will help you unload a moving van full of furniture in hundred-degree heat, who shoots baskets with your kid, a man of wit and grace and excellent humor. If the measure of a man is in the children he leaves behind, then Edsel Peters was a very fine man indeed.

Losing your father unmoors you. It doesn’t matter how grown up you might be, how accomplished. Suddenly you are rudderless, flying blind, walking the tightrope without a net.  Three years ago, when I told my friend Judy that my father had died, she said, “Oh honey, you’ve done lost your right arm.”  It was the absolute truth. I lost my sense of navigation. I was clumsy with grief.

Judy’s own father, Virg Lovell, has been gone forty years or so. He spent years raising and showing Foxhounds, and it was Judy, not her brothers, who followed in his footsteps, from the time she was two years old. Seventy years later, Judy’s still raising and showing Foxhounds, maybe the best in the country. She still talks about her father like he might well walk through the door.

We carry our fathers with us; perhaps in a gesture, a certain turn of a phrase, a predilection for Miracle Whip on our fried egg sandwich, maybe a tendency to sing along with the car radio. I wonder at times about my mother’s father, Bennie Lee Ouzts, who died after being injured in a logging accident when my mother was just twelve. Did he look out across the horizon lost in thought the way my mother does? Did he throw his head back when he laughed the way his sons and daughters do? I never saw my Nana do that, but each of the six children do.

There aren’t many photographs of him. In my mind’s eye, he looks like Gregory Peck (though my mother will no doubt say “Of course not”) and I know that his nickname for my mother was Cooter (after the snapping turtle) and I know that his death became a kind of wound for my mother that never quite heals.

My Nana’s father died when she was just a girl as well. If I knew the exact circumstances, I have forgotten them. What I remember is that his death meant that my grandmother had to quit school in the 8^th grade and go to work in the cotton mills. In the last hours of my grandmother’s life, my mother sat at the hospital bedside, watching Nana sleep. Suddenly, my mother said, Nana looked to a place somewhere above the doorframe, lifted up her arms the way a child will when she wants to be carried and whispered “Papa! Papa!”

For me the first death in the family was my father’s father, my Grandpa Paul Vonalt. He died just shy of 80, after an illness. I was an adult by then, and the news, conveyed to me by telephone did not dissemble me the way I expected it to. I felt very sad, missing in advance the unassuming man who taught me to fish for bluegills, sharpen pencils with a Swiss Army knife, how to paint hex signs. Every summer visit, he’d loan me his green Huffy 3-speed bicycle to tool around town.

I expected to go to Grandpa’s funeral. It was just a day’s drive, and I made plans to go. But my father told me not to come. He said that it was too risky with the February weather, that Grannie and Grandpa knew how much I loved them, that I didn’t need to come out, that I shouldn’t. Being that this is an extended family that reassembles for fish fries and baby showers and 40^th birthdays, I was puzzled by my father’s insistence that I stay in Boston and not come.

It was only after his funeral that I truly understood why. My father needed that time to be the grieving child. Consumed by sorrow for the loss of his father, he didn’t have the emotional wherewithal to be there for me. I knew this finally because when Dad died, it was my husband who stepped in to care for our son and guide him through the loss of his Grandpa. I was too shattered to be anyone’s mother.

Daniel Sullivan was the first of my friend’s fathers to be lost. His daughter Noelle has been one of my closest friends for nearly twenty years. When I first met Noelle, her father was in remission. It didn’t last. I didn’t know what to do and I wasn’t the friend that I should have been. We were new to this, to facing the unthinkable.  Dan Sullivan fought the fight long and hard. I wish I could say that I was present for Noelle; that I provided tea and sympathy, a kind ear and arms to shelter in. But I wasn’t, at least not in the way I should have been. I didn’t know what to say, and I was a little bit afraid. If Noelle’s father could so easily slip away over the edge, what about my own?

In truth I had two fathers and in the end, I lost them both. My stepfather, Humphrey Clarke Booth, died while brushing his teeth, shooting straight to the sun, gone before his body hit the floor. That was always his style anyway. He was in England, the news came by telephone.  This is the man who taught me to drive, (“remember to speed up in the curves”) bought me my first horse, my first car, ordered me my first Martini. He soothed my broken heart, smoothed the oft-ruffled feathers between my mother and me, and made damn sure the lunch ladies in the English primary school never again made comment on the way I held my fork. His death, instant and far away, was also a strange kindness, a leg up on being an orphan before I really had to face it.

And even then, I came undone. I stayed out all night, writing, drinking. When I slept it was fitful. When I ate, it was a dozen raw oysters and a few Bombay Sapphire martinis every night at the Livingston Bar and Grille. One night it was one of the wait staff that drove me home. Other times I’d crash on the studio floor of a painter friend. Finally I asked a woman I knew for something to help get me out of the fog. She gave me a prescription, but no one remembered to tell me that I shouldn’t wash it down with gin. That landed me in the world of ipecac and activated charcoal, discussing a Thomas Jefferson biography with one of the ER docs in between wretching. The next morning I felt much better, as if somehow I’d got my bearings back again.

My stepsister read Dylan Thomas’ “Do Not Go Gently into That Good Night” at her father’s funeral. At the time it struck me as a peculiar choice, one made only because it is a plaint from child to father. And you, my father, there on the sad height/ Curse, bless me now with your fierce tears I pray / Do not go gentle into that good night / Rage rage against the dying of the light. Reading it now, I realize that it is absolute stricken wail of a child. It’s beautiful and it’s brilliant, but that doesn’t disguise the primal nature of the plea:  Don’t leave me, don’t leave me, Daddy, don’t leave me.

My father told me he was dying by asking me if I wanted his poetry books. My father and I had many of the same poetry books. (Perhaps another shared quality, like the way I hold the steering wheel, or a preference for Cabernet over Merlot)  He was an English professor; I’d grown up reading Anne Sexton and Robert Lowell and Elizabeth Bishop and for a while was a poet myself. Some bookshelves bow under the weight of those slender volumes. If my father was offering me his poetry books it was because he would not need them anymore. That was in August. He taught his last class in December. He was dead the day after Christmas.

In the months between August and December, I wrestled with my father’s impending death. He was dying from laryngeal cancer. There had been immense amounts of radiation, and finally in a last ditch attempt the previous January they’d taken out his larynx, and made a permanent hole in his throat, given him a little black box on a cord around his neck in exchange for his voice. It was supposed to be the price for a cure, but they didn’t hold up their end of the deal.

It’s a parlor game to ask what you would do if you knew you only had a year, a few months, a few weeks left. I don’t know what my father might have said when the question was just hypothetical. When it was real, he went on with his life as he knew it. He drove down to his office at the university, met with students, taught classes, stopped by the Chef’s Pantry for good wine and roast beef and cheese on the way home. He took his wife to dinner, they listened to music. He sent emails to old friends and family members. They scheduled times for people to visit.

I suggested that we might come for Thanksgiving, and was told, no, Michael and his family were coming. I’m an only child. Michael is the son of my father’s wife. It was a stinging knockdown, one that left me sitting in tears. I wanted to finish the unfinished business; I wanted to clear the air, set things right. My father just wanted to go on with his life as he knew it. He asked for suggestions for the memorial service. I made them. He said he’d check with his wife. I lost my temper and reminded him he had other family. He sent back a six-word email “Why don’t you just cool it?”

I carefully crafted an email about how upset and enraged I felt about his impending death, how I wanted to set things right between us. He wrote that he didn’t want me to feel enraged. How could I help it? I wasn’t ready. Grave men near death, who see with blinding sight / Blind eyes could blaze like meteors and be gay / Rage, rage against the dying of the light. It seemed that I could do nothing right. There are platitudes about having a chance to say goodbye. Sometimes it’s easier if you lose your father while he is brushing his teeth.

We went to see my father in the middle of December. He was clearly near the end. Dad went into the hospital to have a feeding tube put in. From his hospital bed, he wrote directions on a half-size legal pad as to cleaning out his office at school. I might have spent hours at his bedside, but instead I went up to the university and packed. Every few hours I would return to the hospital and ask what to do about various papers, or files, or stacks of literary journals. “Send them,” he scribbled, or “Take them if you want them,” or most often “Pitch it.”  I took all the poetry books.

The doctors thought we had another month. They were wrong. As we drove away that night, through a snowstorm to Kansas City on our way back to Montana, I could not stop crying. My heart knew what my head could not yet accept. We promised to come back in two weeks. The last thing my Dad said to me, his mouth silently forming the words was “I’m sorry.”

“Me too, Dad. I’m sorry too.”

We got a phone call on the morning of the 26^th. Dad had been admitted to the hospital, this was it. He might have until the close of day. I called every airline that flew out of Montana. If I could get to the airport in the next twenty minutes, I could catch the last flight that would have made a connection to get me to St. Louis at ten o’clock that night. But the airport was an hour and a half away.

“I’ll drive you to Missouri,” my husband said. “Don’t worry, I can drive straight through.”  Straight through was1400 miles in the snow. I shook my head. He wasn’t even conscious anymore, it was time to act like the daughter of the pragmatist he was. The day seemed to go on without end. When the phone rang again about 8 p.m., it was all over. If we’d started driving, we would only have gotten as far as Denver.

My husband’s father died a long time ago, and when I’ve asked him about it, he changes the subject. Oh, he’ll say how he got the call. How no one in his family had told him that his father was dying. That he flew to L.A. by himself, as his first wife declined to accompany him. He’ll recall how he found a cash register slip on his father’s dresser for six Porterhouse steaks that were on sale at a great price.  His father had bought them just a few days before he died and now Porterhouse steaks are forever entwined with that memory. The stories my husband tells about Pon Lieu are the stories of his life and never of his death. When I asked once how his father had died, Elmer said, “I think he just gave up.” I don’t have to ask him how he felt to lose his father; I know the answer to that.

I envy my friends who still have their fathers, and especially my cousins, the children of my father’s brothers. I worry about my husband and our 14-year-old son, who are caught up in that push-me-pull-you of adolescence. I can’t stand to hear them yelling at each other. Don’t they realize how precious is the time they have together, how we can’t really say which memories will linger on, which parts of the relationship become the legacy carried in one’s heart? 

Worse still is my husband’s younger daughter from his first marriage.  She is so caught up in her own anger and self-pity that she has excluded her father altogether from her life. He hasn’t heard from her in three years, and any attempts he’s made at communicating have gone unanswered. I want to take her by the shoulders and say “Don’t you realize?! Don’t you know how much you’ll regret this when it’s too late?”

It was only after my father’s memorial service that I learned from strangers that he had been proud of me, that he thought I’d turned out just fine despite everything. One person after another recounted for me the things Dad had told them about me. Sorting through his boxes and files, I found letters I’d written as a child, pieces I’d published in high school, poems I’d worked on, and reams of newspaper stories I’d written. I can’t help but wonder how different those last months might have been if only I’d known.

Driving in the car one morning the spring after my father’s death, I heard a bit of Stephen Sondheim’s Into the Wood on the radio. I’ve seen the play, and I turned up the song.

People make mistakes. Fathers. Mothers. People make mistakes. Holding to their own, thinking they’re alone. Honor their mistake. Fight for their mistakes. One another’s terrible mistakes. Witches can be right. Giants can be good. You decide what’s right. You decide what’s good. Just remember: someone is on your side. Someone else is not. While we’re seeing our side maybe we forgot. They are not alone. No one is alone.

I’m a little abashed to say that I found the answer to the father-child conundrum in a Broadway song. All that expectation, all that disappointment, all that dependence and love and struggle. But there it is: People make mistakes. Fathers. Mothers. People make mistakes. In recognizing my father as only human, I am able to accept having to let him go. I am glad he went gentle into that good night, and suffered no more. I miss him every day. I wish he could have come farther along the journey with us, but sometimes people leave you halfway through the wood. Still, we carry his map and his compass.

After the funeral of our friend’s father, I wanted to say some of these things. At least I wanted to say it gets better. It won’t always hurt so much. Your questions won’t have answers but the questions grow quieter in time. I wanted to say you won’t always feel like a fatherless child. You never stop missing your father, but you grow stronger in time.  But I didn’t say any of this. I just hugged our friends and said how sorry I was.

 

Sherman in the Snow

It always snows on Easter in Montana. It doesn’t matter if there’s been a deluge of warm spring days. It doesn’t matter if it’s an early Easter, or a late one as it was that year. The weather gods care not if the City Fire Department colored 3000 eggs for the annual Easter egg scramble (and why they go on doing that since it always snows is a mystery to me) the forecast for Easter is always snow, and that Easter was no different.

Finishing up the last of dishes from Easter lunch, I grinned as I watched out the window at our old Chesapeake Bay retriever playing in the snow. Pushing 16, Sherman’s enthusiasm for the weather made him seem a young dog again. He loved being outside, in water if at all possible. Snow seemed a reasonable second. He stuck his nose in the juniper bushes, dislodging a small avalanche onto his head. He rolled and gamboled through the drifts.

My husband and I are hound people, and when Sherman came to live with us we had a kennel full of rescued coonhounds. When you read, “kennel full” you should realize that means they were in the house too: on the sofa, under the kitchen table, underfoot and in the way, vying with our toddler son for attention. 

Six years before that Easter Sunday, Sherman was my mother’s project. Daily, she passed by a trailer court where a dull brown dog was endlessly tethered to a doghouse. One afternoon before Christmas, she stopped in at the trailer and inquired if she could visit with the dog. Yes, they said, she was welcome to play with the dog, his name was Sherman and by the way, they were looking for a good home for him, if she knew anyone that might be interested. 

The neighborhood children who teased him at the end of his chain marked Sherman’s life at the trailer park. He’d been maced a few times by the meter readers. His pelvis had been crushed when he was hit by a pickup, but the owner thought enough of the dog that he paid to have him put back together again. Sherman was seven years old, the owner thought, but he might be eight or nine, even.

Rescued dog stories are supposed to have happily-ever-after endings, but it didn’t quite turn out that way. My mother already had a big male dog, a middle-aged golden retriever named Gus. Sherman and Gus hated each other on sight.  Mom kept a couple of horses out at our farm and she brought the dogs out with her in the afternoons. Gus in the back seat and Sherman behind the barrier, snarling at each other the whole way. 

Sherman would romp in the dog yard with the coonhounds while our son Julian threw tennis balls for Gus out front.  Only two years old, Julian couldn’t toss the ball far, but Gus didn’t mind. He retrieved the tennis ball faithfully each and every time. Occasionally a passing adult would lob it a greater distance to reward the dog for his patience.

One afternoon the gate to the dog yard didn’t get quite closed. Sherman came charging around the front of the house, tangling with Gus, fighting with serious intent. Julian was knocked to one side, fell down and began to cry.  Hearing the fracas, my mother came running from the barn.  The dogs didn’t kill each other, but they could have, had they been allowed to continue.

I saw the question coming weeks before she actually asked. Did we think that Sherman could stay with us for a little while?  The dog’s temperament made me somewhat anxious. Julian was only two and not entirely sensible about dogs. Sherman was a sweet dog much of the time, but we agreed we couldn’t trust him around our son, not after the treatment he’d had from the kids in the trailer court.

“Okay,” I told my Mom. “He can stay here with us for awhile. We’ll see how it goes.” And for the most part, it went pretty well.  Sherman was a little grumbly at times, demanding to be fed or let out with something that seemed a lot like ferocity.  We were careful around him, taking pains to avoid confrontation, never leaving him unsupervised, trying to keep him in a place where he wouldn’t get himself into trouble.

“You cannot touch him when he is eating or sleeping,” we told Julian over and over, with great emphasis. But Sherman thought Julian was great, just the right size to have his faced licked, while Julian giggled hysterically.

“Not so fun to throw the ball for Sherman as Gus, Mommy,” Julian said to me one day.

“Why is that, Jules?” I asked calmly, though my blood ran cold. When had Julian been throwing the tennis ball for Sherman?

“Oh Daddy lemme throw ball some times but Sherman dunnit like to give back,” he answered matter-of-factly. “Gus always drop ball on my foot, and slimy.” 

It was poor judgment to try to remove anything from Sherman’s mouth, and being a retriever he almost always had something in his mouth. Socks, a toy dinosaur, Julian’s tennis ball, an ornament off the Christmas tree, pens, pencils, pocket calculators, bags of pasta.

He’s the only dog I’ve ever known that had a real yen for uncooked noodles. He’d sit in front of me while I was dropping spaghetti in a pot and beg for some. Left in the kitchen alone for just a few moments, he could open the cupboard, pull out a bag of egg noodles, consume half and leave the other half scattered across the kitchen floor in the two minutes I was gone.

In time we realized that Sherman would happily relinquish whatever treasure he had in his mouth for a dog biscuit. He was playing a game with us, of holding various objects ransom for a Milk Bone, and he’d trained us well.

Some nights, coming up hard on deadline, I often took Sherman with me when I went to the newspaper office. At first I took him because he looked and sounded ferocious enough to dissuade anyone who might show up with bad intentions. What I found is that he was good company, listening patiently while I read a story out loud looking for errors; sleeping peacefully when I needed to work without interruptions.

We’d had Sherman for two years when I took him with me up to a Forest Service cabin one October. I was working on a story about a long-lost route pioneers threaded through the mountains.  Sherman and I set off together in the little pickup truck, with the big brown dog riding shotgun for a few days in our own Walden.  Halfway up the mountain road, I stopped the truck and let him out to ride in the truck bed, driving ten miles an hour up the logging road to the cabin. He was ecstatic.

It was late afternoon when we arrived, and as I unlocked the door and pushed it open, Sherman rushed in, immediately seizing a box of rat poison left on the floor. I didn’t think about Sherman’s game. I didn’t think about his supposedly unpredictable nature. I put my hand straight down his throat and pulled that box of rat poison right out. He and I stood there and looked at each other, both of us just a little stunned.

I never again had a problem taking anything from Sherman’s mouth, though occasionally I would play along and give him a cookie for ransom.  He continued to buffalo the rest of the family for Milk Bones.

Sherman often slept beside our bed at night, and if I went to bed first, he would hop up in the bed next to me. When my husband came to bed, Sherman would growl at him. It sounded very convincing.  I had to get up, walk around to the other side of the bed, take him by the collar and say “Sherman, knock it off.” He’d grin up at me and clamber down off the bed, follow me around to my side and lie down on the floor.

Sherman and I often traveled together, retracing the steps of Lewis and Clark, covering the circuit of small town rodeos, searching out the western roots of long dead movie stars. He was an excellent companion. There’s something very nice about the loyalty of the sporting dog. Free from the tyranny of the nose that rules the hound, Sherman was happiest following alongside.

There were frequent inquiries: what kind of dog is that?  If you could cross a Labrador with a bear that might approximate the Chesapeake Bay retriever. Their coats rough and wavy, their bearing noble, their hearts deeply loyal. Generally polite, they can take awhile to warm up to strangers, but the devotion they show their owners knows no bounds. The bottom line for these dogs, for Sherman, is that he would give his life for mine.

In hotels and sheepherder wagons, forest service cabins and motor courts, when I lay down for the night, Sherman settled on the floor right next to the bed. He chose the spot where I’d have to put my feet should I get up while he was sleeping. He didn’t want me to slip away while he was in dreamland, and he stood between me and whatever went bump in the night.

Together we covered a lot of ground: up to British Columbia, along the Flathead lake shore, east to the plains, retrieving timbers from the Mighty Mo. We sat together atop a boulder in the Charles M. Russell National Wilderness Refuge having driven all day without seeing anyone. We went west to the Oregon coast, exploring lighthouses and rocky shorelines and the great wide sandy beach at Seaside. 

On the beach Sherman ran like a dog one quarter his age, crossing back and forth in and out of the surf. We shared cheeseburgers on the boardwalk, which meant trying to get his out of the bag and unwrapped before he ate it, and then trying to keep him out of my lap while I ate mine. He was certain I needed help with it.

Now, though, time was catching up with him. He had a persistent cough, not wracking, but there all the same. His vision was probably reduced to light and dark, basic shapes and forms. Sometimes you had to call him more than once.

“I need to take the old guy on one more road trip,” I thought, watching him playing in the late afternoon snow. Hanging up the dishtowel, I went to finish up a short article that was due on an editor’s desk in two days. Julian was sugared out on Easter candy, constantly appearing at my elbow to show me or ask me or tell me. His Dad was napping on the sofa in front of the television. 

When I heard the ticking stopwatch theme of “Sixty Minutes” I realized it was time to feed dogs. I scooped kibble into stainless dishes, and then stopped, a little panicky around the edges. Where was Sherman? It was long beyond dusk, and Sherman had not come in. I opened the door and called his name into the still and snowy landscape. Surely he was just curled up against the house, or sleeping in the barn. I expected his smiling face to appear in a rush before me.

“Sherman,” I called. There was not even a rustle in the darkness.

“Have you seen the dog?” I asked my husband.

“Which dog?”

“Sherman. He was playing outside earlier.  Did you let him in?”

“I thought I saw him….” My husband’s voice trailed off as he moved through the house, calling the dog’s name. I shrugged into my winter jacket, laced up my boots, found hat and mittens and a flashlight and went out.

The snow had stopped and before me the world sparkled, a wonderland of smooth white frosting in the moonlight.  There were dog tracks around the house, lots of them from his afternoon antics, but none went off in any particular direction.

“Sherman!” I called. The driveway was smooth with a deep cover of snow, unmarred by tracks of any sort. The ponies blinked at me sleepily as my flashlight beam found them dozing in a corner of the pasture. “Sherman!” The aspens whispered, but no brown dog came barreling out at me.

In the distance I could hear my husband calling “Sherman, Sherrrmmannnn” I crossed the bridge over the creek, but it too was covered with undisturbed snow. I found tracks on the other side: deer, a small padded track, maybe a weasel, maybe a barn cat; but nothing, nothing that could have been a dog.  There had to be something. If not tracks, then some other sign of a disturbance, a struggle, blood; but the fields of unblemished snow stretched out endlessly. 

“Sherman!” I called, sliding down an embankment, brushing the snow off my jeans.  What if he needed me? What if he was hurt somewhere and couldn’t answer me? I searched along the creek banks, peered into gullies, struggled through briars, tearing my coat.  “Damn,” I said, inspecting the tear. “Sherman, where are you?” To the south, in Farrell Lloyd’s pasture, cows shuffled in the night air, stirring sleepily. Nothing was amiss but my missing dog. 

Years ago, we lost a small dog in the brush. She trotted off one morning and was never seen again. Months later, another of our dogs walked straight up to me and delicately dropped a tiny jawbone on my foot. The county coroner, a family friend, verified that it was indeed the jaw of a small dog. 

We knew that we had an elderly mountain lion living at the far end of the property. He had made a bad end for many of our barn cats, and we surmised that he had been Sadie’s last encounter too. I couldn’t help but think of the lion as I searched.

But cats and a 15-pound dog are prey of a certain order; Sherman weighed ninety pounds and was, even at his advanced age, able to summon ferocious bravado. Surely an old lion wouldn’t bother with such a struggle? Surely a lion wouldn’t come right up the house? I hadn’t seen any lion tracks among those in the snow outside the kitchen window.

The sleepy cows added some measure of comfort as when a predator is in the area, all the animals are on high alert, not dozing contentedly on a hillside.

Still, dread was beginning to form a lead ball in the pit of my stomach.  I peered into the long abandoned chicken coop, slogged my way through the snow to another outbuilding along the creek. Empty, and silent. 

“Sherman,” I called. “Where are you buddy?” The creek burbled.  Could he have stumbled in? Or jumped in intentionally, not realizing how swift and cold it was with the combination of spring melt and new snow?

He would cheerfully go into frigid waters after a duck, but I couldn’t think of anything that would have enticed him into the creek late in the afternoon. There was, after all, no one to retrieve for. And anyway, the creek was still shallow enough that his body could not have floated freely to the Yellowstone, it would have been snagged along the bank, here or here or here.

My wool mittens were wet and soggy from searching and my toes numb with cold; I hadn’t stopped to put on an extra pair of socks on my way out the door.

Along the banks of the creek, east of the house, in a grove of willows I found dog tracks.

“Sherman!” I called with renewed intensity. “Sherman . . .” A rustle, near the creek. “Sherman?”  A low bark answered me; my heart leapt. “Hey, old pal, what are you doing?” 

I still couldn’t see the dog, but I heard more rustling, another single woof. Finally, my flashlight beam lit on the figure of a dog climbing up the side of the ridge: our neighbor’s blue heeler, headed south towards home. I sat down in the snow and cried.

Sherman wasn’t asleep in the barn. He wasn’t waiting for me by the door. He wasn’t resting under the junipers. He wasn’t drowned in the creek. There were no tracks up to the road, but I went up there anyway and walked along the highway, looking for a huddled form. There was none. Where could he be? He wouldn’t have gotten into a car with a stranger. He wouldn’t have trotted off to town. Everything he loved was in the house at the end of the drive.

Inside the house, I shed coat, hat, and mittens and called the Sheriff’s dispatcher. “Has anyone reported finding a dog? Or the body of a dog?”  No one had. I left a message on the answering machine of the Humane Society. Many times through the evening I went to the door and called.

Julian went to bed, asking as I tucked him in: “Do you think Sherman is okay?” 

I kissed my eight year old on the forehead and said, much more brightly than I felt “I bet Sherman will be here in the morning when you wake up.”

But he wasn’t.  Sleep makes you forget, but as soon as my eyes opened grim reality flooded in. Sherman! He was missing. Driving Julian to school, I scanned the horizon for the dog or for something that might have been the dog. There was nothing. My husband went to work, I kept searching.

My heart leapt when the Humane Society called, but they just wanted more information about my missing dog.  “Yes, he had a collar,” I told them. “Yes, he’d been wearing tags. No, he wouldn’t have gone with anyone, and besides if anyone had approached the house the other dogs would have gone bananas.”  My mother came over to help me look.

“Sherman!” we called, our voices trailing away in the Montana wind.  The other dogs barked and fussed. After some consideration I let one of them, a blue tick hound named Sophie, out to help look. Delighted with her newfound freedom, Sophie took off full-tilt for the pastures and meadows behind the house and headed towards the mountain range.

One day came to an end and another began, without a sign of our woolly dog. I continued to search. Sophie, the errant hound, returned grinning. As we drove down the driveway after school on Tuesday afternoon, I spied something in the west pasture. A dark brown fuzzy heap collapsed in the snow.

“Oh no,” my husband said sadly.

I got out of the car wordlessly, walking towards the mound in the snow, tears welling in my eyes. I couldn’t quite comprehend how my wonderful old dog, my brown clown, had become this bundle in the middle of the pasture. Perhaps a heart attack felled him in his tracks. Had he been caught up somewhere and used the last of his life forces to extricate himself, dying on his way home? As I drew near I began to laugh. It wasn’t Sherman in the snow at all. It was the head of an enormous buffalo.

Our neighbor to the west was new to country living. No doubt he’d bought the head of a domestic buffalo from a slaughterhouse and left it outside to “cure,” as he had so many other things. Sophie must have found the head, gnawed the ears and horns and tried to drag home her treasure.  I left it there in the pasture; let the neighbor draw his own conclusions.

The Humane Society never had a dog that matched Sherman’s description or even a sighting of one. The Department of Transportation didn’t find him by any roadside. None of the neighbors found him in any of their outbuildings, or pastures or creek sides. There was never a single call on the any of the “lost” ads we ran in the local papers. We never found a trace of Sherman.  Not a bone, not a scrap of fur. Sherman was simply gone.

In time, we constructed a plausible story to explain the end of his life, saying simply that we’d lost him to heart problems; the coughing, he was fifteen after all.  We always say how he’d been playing in the snow in the hours before he died, an example of the Chesapeake zeal for life.  With close friends we examined the mystery, how had the dog simply disappeared? Maybe he’d crawled into the brush and died, I just hadn’t been able to find him.

Maybe that was it.  Because people look askance if you told them what you knew to be the truth: that your great old dog, your truest friend and your protector went straight up to heaven, leaving no tracks in the snow behind him.