Jesus Wept, EZ Slept
Friday, October 18Ð

8:18 p.m.-

      EZ raised her head from the bed and stared hard but emotionless at the radio by the door. It is she who has taught me open-minded fortitude toward fresh ideas and offensive civility, to be patient and calm and not snobbish toward highfalutin bombast. So I was alarmed when she jerked out of sleep to stare disdainfully at the radio's busy-spirited whinnying.

      When we come to Minnesota I like to join in its cultural melange, (football is not culture), so I tune in Minnesota Public Radio and enjoy it as long as I can. I have besmirched the pipe organ music they play, but that's Michael Barone's baby and public radio bosses only buy rights from him to torment its patrons. Minnesota soaring violins sound pretty much the same as Wisconsin soaring violins, when airwaves in the trees rustle along.

      I got out the radio shortly before 8 and worked through stations at the left end of the dial, shoving out country music, sweet talk beseeching me to reclaim my soul for Christ, and a brief excursion all the way left where NBC's audio promoted "jiggles and giggles" on channel six next Tuesday night. It is Public Radio pledge drive time in Wisconsin, so tonight I am doubly driven to exclude it in favor of MPR's agenda.

      I was given a glowing introduction to what was to follow, as performed by The Minnesota Orchestra. "Surprising as a snowflake on your nose," is what I recall most about the host's poetic remarks. He alluded to the snow storm I drove through today, and that others in Minnesota were also surprised by this morning. (It was the season's first, and unnaturally heavy, and heaped up slush an inch or two deep on the highway.)

      The commentator was fully ecstatic and praised me for tuning him in. I relaxed at the cardtable and fired up the Coleman and got the oil lamp and five white taper candles lit, opened a beer, sat down and got out my work. I leaned back in the chair and crossed my legs. The radio audience rushed to its seats and hushed.

      A violin rasped out a violent sharp note. Just for a moment. Then a comrade scraped her fingernails across the chalkboard, half-a-note higher. Two aroused mice lurched across my forehead and dove into a deep wastebasket. Birch bark burst off a tree outside and the ghost plane--ironically flying over just at the moment--backfired both motors twice.

      Jesus wept, EZ slept.

      I calmed my conservatism and recollected my patience. I mean, how can I learn anything good if I hastily discard discord?

      I got to work and tried to ignore preliminary bad things filling the air. EZ snored and red ink got marked and babies got born in faraway places. I got up and peed myself through a slit of narrow door and listened to country music outside in the trees.

      A few minutes later, all settled and safe at the table, the composer decided to alter snow music from surprising to dangerous. Every fiddler in the house plucked random notes out of horsehair--"plink, plunk, scree-Plonk!"

      EZ reared out of slumber and glared at the radio for a long time. Then, moving only her eyes, she gave me a scary stare.

      So now, the radio is off and she is asleep, sunk into the covers where I'll be joining her soon.

      She's clean and relatively un-stinky. She was not, earlier in the afternoon and I almost sent her a long way away. But I didn't know where, and knew at the time it was only a fit of temporary resentment.

      We were out back. I'd found an oak to split into firewood pieces. EZ was roaming at-large, freed after weeks of cooped-up life while I was away every day. But she lives responsibly and I need not monitor her behavior when we are here, where there are no public people she can run up to and scare with her broad smile. Once in a while, failing to find her, she turns out to be close by and blending exactly with the dead ferns. I whistle gently and she'll pop up her head and come running. I'll give her a pet and tell her how happy she makes me and she runs off again.

      I whistled when the splitting was done. She bounded out of disguise and came and sat at my feet with a glowing emerald green ring of shit around her neck. Extravagant radiant work encircling her chest hairs, with prize-winning arrangements and baubles hanging deep down into red furry cleavage. Mister Theo, down to the strip mall, had performed his best design. Raccoon shit woven into ringlets on the ears. Skunk shit dabbed discreetly along collarbone fur. Fox shit or bear, retained in original shape, spangled in evenly-spaced dangles, swaying brightly across her damn-blasted neck. Flecks of seven-watt mica twinkling, powered by a battery pack concealed in a sack beneath her vulva.

      I told her grand words of high passion, geared toward the illustrious shit. Then added additional expressions of barnyard fornication, with praises plucked from sentiments of "bastardly bitch." Then escorted her back to the cabin to undo what the lord did create.

      Water sloshed out of the gallon jug onto EZ's body. Contrite, she sat. I poured and scrubbed with a turquoise-bristled brush that had sat out of work on the kitchen shelf for decades without intention.

      Does she know I, like a furious father, forced to esteem an adolescent's vulgar tit tattoo, don't want her to do this to herself. Does she know I trust her to freedom, to do what she wants, and expect her not to show off inappropriate adornings in a way I'll have to pretend to appreciate, or hold a T-shirt over my nose during the night?
 

Saturday, October 19, '02--

      Seems there's nothing to record. Drab day, but for a short-lived break of blue sky during late morning. Laid in bed after building a fire to fight back the twenty-degree temperature. EZ was glad to have me awake and rearranged herself where a pillow might be if another person were sleeping here too, and took full advantage of my face so close she could've licked it without stretching, and she did. Finally got up at 8:30. Listened to Scott Simon declare that North Korea is advancing nuclear weaponry against our better judgment. Made coffee and went into town because I didn't know what else to do. Filled the car with gas and waited to pay while an older lady had trouble with the register. A DNR ranger had filled his tank and gone in to pay before me, and created some sort of snafu in the system. The tormented lady apologized, then explained that she usually doesn't work the front counter but only bakes pizzas at the back of the store. She muttered slurs at blinking yellow lights on a panel, then looked up at me.

      "Ten dollars on pump three," I promised and set the money down and went outside. The place was empty except for the DNR truck. As I rounded my car I noticed that the rear tire was soft and needed a breath of fresh air. So I drove around the back and found an air hose against the side wall of the building. I parked. A newer Taurus pulled up and parked. One, two, three cars and trucks pulled off the highway and stopped under the gas canopy to refuel.

      "Go inside and get the air chuck from attendant," said a sign scrawled above the air hose.

      Two teenagers were already in line with bottles of caffeine and candy. Pizza woman was not coping. She had a phone held high at the end of its tether, and I heard busy-signal sounds bleating. The DNR man was doing fine, smiling patience, but his mustache had lost its starch. A woman who'd been pumping gas into her Contour, finished and came inside, detouring quickly behind the counter when she saw chaos bloating back there.

      Pizza Woman wailed indistinguishable scandal. Contour Lady who worked there or owned the place bellowed this and that instruction that none of us grasped, especially Pizza Lady who threw her the phone and said, "you do it. I gotta' get back to the pizza or it'll be smoke."

      A Greyhound hissed at the curb and ejected glad passengers. Men finished pumping and hung up their hoses. A Jeep and a Sunfire honked at each other, each desiring the same open pump under the canopy, and began bumping bumpers for control of the spot.

      I decided the Citgo station up the way might be a better place to get air, so went there.

11:30 a.m.-

      Pushing through inertia with no interest in working, I moved a pile of firewood from out back to the empty storage spot by the cabin. Then, needing to start new firewood seasoning, I brought the chainsaw around back and selected a birch, leaning just right amid a stand of dark hardwoods, where it was dying back. I cut a small slot then told EZ to "go back," which she interpreted as sideways an inch. She finally backed out of range to the car and I resumed the quick cut. The tree leaned generally where I told it, then stopped leaning and hugged up to an oak and shivered dead leaves on my head.

      I selected another ready birch on the other side of the trail. It did the same thing and refused to fall down. So did a perfect oak thirty feet away. It grabbed the saw bar and wrenched the chain out of its slot, before I could wrest it away.

1:35 p.m.-

      Down to the Store for a free hamburger. (This morning's town trip also gave me a chance to bring back a box of supplies for Meg who promised a free hamburger for my trouble.)

      A family of four is at the biggest round table with a man called grandpa. Meg is less harried than usual this time of year, since bear hunting is done and deer hunting season is yet three weeks away. Herb is carrying away dishes from the round table nearest the cooler. I sit at his table by the radio.

      "You want a menu?"

      "No thanks."

      He sticks a bottle of ketchup back in the fridge. As he limps past I ask for a small bowl of chili and a hamburger with fried onions, not sure if he heard. I scan through The Scotsman, a weekly shopper with ads for used trucks and used tractors and used houses on lakes for hundreds of thousands of dollars. New septic systems sound like a good idea. So do Carhart hunter's wear and Zero-percent financing for new and used cars out on the freeway.

      Meg delivers my chili and I get under way. Herb brings my hamburger in the red plastic basket with a layer of waxed paper inside and sits down across the table. I eat with endorphin-crazed passion. He drums his fingers at odd sudden intervals, a habit he's practiced for years when he doesn't have words, most of the time.

      We attempt small talk. Tortured and grim. Not something either of us have a favorable talent for.

      "Richard," says Herb, watching the window.

      Two men jingle the bells on the door and step up inside. Ordinary farmer-types, but Herb's tone of voice and Meg's grunt in the kitchen says Richard, and maybe his companion are not welcome. They sit by the cooler.

      "Hamburger. Nothin' else. I've got that ... big deal to go to later tonight."

      The other fellow wants chili. Herb doesn't move, but throws his voice toward the back and makes sure Meg hears the order.

      A group of seven adults enters, dressed bulky in sweaters and insulated clothing. They stand just inside the door, without familiarity of what to do next. Newcomers unfamiliar with a natural ease.

      "I guess we'll take this table here," says a man in his fifties. A woman his age curses and takes off her jacket, then walks into the grocery department swinging her hands, ridding them of cold.

      I carry my dishes to the sink and thank Meg and Herb, escaping, feeling sorry that they have to keep plugging through week after week of this trap they don't like anymore.

      Back to the cabin and split up a dead maple that'd broken high, a perfect section of firewood.

      My God! It is argumentative and stringy wood. The maul bounces off the first and second and third swings. The fourth submerges and the bark separates slightly, held tight by fibrous white sinews holding firmly to each other.

      Gunshots have been increasing in frequency during the day. It's Saturday in October, but bear hunting is over and I foolishly thought traffic--MY GOD!--and firearm play would be diminished since September. I almost didn't come this time, but thought it was needed to soften my distaste over last time's annoyance.

      I counted twenty-four "pops, booms, blams" in a two-minute survey while splitting. Retreated to the cabin to decide what to do. Can't write. Can't nap because of the noise. So I escaped in the car and drove to Askov where nothing was happening. Back to the cabin and a two-hour nap despite the noise.

6:20 p.m.-

      There is nothing more pleasing than stacking fresh firewood while listening to Garrison Keillor tell us about life in Lake Woebegone. It is not about what we feel at the moment, although that's pleasing enough. It's about the smell of dead leaves on the grass and cold air on my cheeks and the textures of bark and currents of wood grain submerging into my veins.

      Pledge drive time. For some reason radio people are airing a program recorded back in 1986 and we are reminded of Bertha's Kitty Boutique and Jim's Auto repair and other friends we'd gotten forgotten as years ago became today again.

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