Heel Marks

Mom told me the heel marks on the dining room table had been made by her two younger sisters and herself. Her little brother probably added a few as well. I knelt down and studied the scars in the century-old wood-ran my fingers over them, tried to feel the sounds above the table in the 1920s. Just chatter, I suppose.

"May we take a ride in the Cadillac today, daddy?" my little-girl mom is saying to her dad.

"Can we drive down to the swings in the park and play?" my Aunt Jane is asking my grandfather.

"Yes to both questions, girls. First you must clean your plates."

The Cadillac had sixteen cylinders, enough horses to power the engine of a small steamship. It was black and shiny and had a big white-walled spare tire that rested in a round boot just above the front right wheel. It also had a horn on the driver's side, and my mom said her dad would let her squeeze it to show off to the neighbors.

Grandpa knew everything about birds and trees and walnuts and cigars and fine wine and the stock market. He was an expert at his building supply business, and by the late twenties, he was a millionaire. I wish I could have known my grandfather. He sounded like a peach of a guy.

I wondered what the conversation had been like in late October, 1929, after the stock market crashed and Grandpa lost everything, including the black Cadillac with its sixteen-cylinder power.

My grandfather was a jovial fellow. You can tell this from all the black-and-white photographs in which he was always laughing and smiling. You would know it as well if you talked to my mom.

"I remember the pistol range Papa had in the basement," she told me once. "It was great fun to go down there and watch my father shoot the center out of the targets. He was a great shot."

She doesn't mention something I learned from my Aunt Jane shortly after my thirteenth birthday. My grandfather was very sad after the market crash-sad to see his money go, sad to release the servants and the butler and the chauffeur, sad to have to put the house up for sale, and sad to sell it for one-third of what he thought it was worth. My grandfather was sad about all of this-so sad that on December 20th, three days before his birthday and five days before Christmas, he went downstairs to his pistol range, picked up his favorite .45 caliber revolver, and fired a shot right through the center of his right temple.

There's no accounting for a loss like that. One minute you have a wonderful jovial man who knows everything about nature and business and how to live the good life. The next minute he's lying in a pool of blood on the gray basement floor across from old copies of the New York Times stacked up in the corner, Christmas decorations festooning the grandfather clock and the mantle in the living room above his corpse, his young children and his wife wondering if the noise was different from the sounds that usually floated up from the pistol range, not yet knowing that this time the target shot in the middle was my grandfather's head.

I feel as though I know my grandpa even though he died a quarter-century before I was born. What confidence he must have had in 1927 and 1928, placing three new cigars in his left breast pocket each morning as he walked from the house to where the chauffeur waited in the cool morning light for his master to climb into the back of the 16-cylinder Cadillac.

"How are you today, Mr. Giles?" everyone must have said as he walked into his office every weekday morning. And they would have really wondered how he was, because he was their employer and his success was important to theirs. How lucky they were to have such a jolly fellow as their boss, who gave them hundred-dollar bonuses at Christmastime like happy Ebenezer Scrooge on Christmas Day, who kidded the secretaries and kissed them on the cheek as a way of showing them how much he loved everybody who worked for him.

His death must have left them all bereft. As if Santa Claus himself had suddenly been shot and killed and there would never be a Christmas again.

I have a keepsake of my grandfather's which was passed down to me through my mother. It's one of the pistols from his shooting range-not the one he used to kill himself, of course, but a .38 caliber Smith and Wesson made in 1926. I used to carry it around secretly when I was first in law practice. As a criminal lawyer, I was defending some pretty tough fellows in the sixties and seventies. In addition, I liked the idea of having my grandfather's pistol with me-not as a weapon, but as a relic of his life-something of my grandfather's that I could carry in a hidden pocket in my leather briefcase and know that a part of him was close to me.

I had a very successful law practice up through 1997. Grandpa would have been proud. I made a lot of money and was able to afford good cigars and fine wine and Ivy League educations for my two children. I also made an effort to learn about birds and trees and the qualities of a good walnut and an excellent single malt scotch. I didn't become an ornithologist or an arborist, but I knew enough to distinguish a house finch from a sparrow and could recognize the different varieties of oak trees.

Fine living-that's what I think my grandfather understood-the joy of puffing on a Cuban cigar and drinking a little brandy and putting your arm around your wife or any other pretty woman or good fellow who happened to be nearby. I sure wish I had known the old guy. I'll bet he told really terrific jokes as he sat around the Beta Theta Pi fraternity house at Northwestern with his feet up on his desk and his thumbs hooked in his vest.

Not everything has gone well for me. My wife left me yesterday. We were married for thirty-five years and I thought we'd entered safe ground-that we would last forever-that she would look after me as I began to fade away-that the only question would be who died first, not who would walk out the door first, leaving the other one as bereft as my grandfather's employees after he shot himself. Now I'm sixty-three, too old to marry again and not interested in doing that anyway.

I slip an anti-depressant capsule into my mouth and swallow it with a Seabreeze cocktail. If it weren't for this pill, I probably would have shot myself already. My life is basically over. Maybe I lived too long. If I'd killed myself shortly after our thirty-fourth anniversary, I would have been honored and esteemed as a fine husband, loving father, and sweet grandfather. I've already lived much longer than my grandfather, who was fifty-one when he blew his brains out.

It's early summer and the sun is setting nice and late. There are a few more minutes of daylight before night sets in and the mockingbirds are the only ones left singing. The petunias are blooming beautifully. Their pungent purple horns cradle hope and their faces track the sun as reliably as the moon. I love petunias.

I'm going to have dinner alone tonight. I'm going to sit at my grandfather's dining room table and run my hands over the scars left by my mother's and aunt's leather heels. I'm going to listen to their laughter as day fades and the darkness and the smoke from my cigar floods in around me.

Erie Chapman

Featured Poet: Mark Jarman

   His poetry and essays have been published widely in such periodicals and journals as American Poetry Review, Gettysburg Review, The Hudson Review, The New Yorker, Poetry, and Southern Review.

   He is professor of English at Vanderbilt University. National Literary Review is pleased to present this selection of four of his poems, all previously published.

~     ~     ~     ~     ~     ~     ~     ~     ~     ~     ~     ~     ~     ~     ~     ~     ~    

"God is in the details."

                  Albert Einstein

In which of these details does God inhere?

The woman's head in the boy's lap? His punctured lung?

The place where she had bitten through her tongue?

The drunk's truck in three pieces? The drunk's beer,

Tossed from the cooler, made to disappear?

The silk tree whose pink flowers overhung

The roadside and dropped limp strings among

The wreckage? The steering column, like a spear?

Where in the details, the cleverness of man

To add a gracenote God might understand,

Does God inhere, cold sober, thunderstruck?

I think it's here, in this one: the open can

The drunk placed by the dead woman's hand,

Telling her son, who cried for help, "Good luck."

From Unholy Sonnets, Poems by Mark Jarman, published by Story Line Press, 2000. Copyright 2000 by Mark Jarman. All Rights Reserved. Used with permission.

  Ground Swell

Is nothing real but when I was fifteen,
Going on sixteen, like a corny song?
I see myself so clearly then, and painfully--
Knees bleeding through my usher's uniform
Behind the candy counter in the theater
After a morning's surfing; paddling frantically
To top the brisk outsiders coming to wreck me,
Trundle me clumsily along the beach floor's
Gravel and sand; my knees aching with salt.
Is that all I have to write about?
You write about the life that's vividest.
And if that is your own, that is your subject.
And if the years before and after sixteen
Are colorless as salt and taste like sand--
Return to those remembered chilly mornings,
The light spreading like a great skin on the water,
And the blue water scalloped with wind-ridges,
And--what was it exactly?--that slow waiting
When, to invigorate yourself, you peed
Inside your bathing suit and felt the warmth
Crawl all around your hips and thighs,
And the first set rolled in and the water level
Rose in expectancy, and the sun struck
The water surface like a brassy palm,
Flat and gonglike, and the wave face formed.
Yes. But that was a summer so removed
In time, so specially peculiar to my life,
Why would I want to write about it again?
There was a day or two when, paddling out,
An older boy who had just graduated
And grown a great blonde moustache, like a walrus,
Skimmed past me like a smooth machine on the water,
And said my name. I was so much younger,
To be identified by one like him--
The easy deference of a kind of god
Who also went to church where I did--made me
Reconsider my worth. I had been noticed.
He soon was a small figure crossing waves,
The shawling crest surrounding him with spray,
Whiter than gull feathers. He had said my name
Without scorn, just with a bit of surprise
To notice me among those trying the big waves
Of the morning break. His name is carved now
On the black wall in Washington, the frozen wave
That grievers cross to find a name or names.
I knew him as I say I knew him, then,
Which wasn't very well. My father preached
His funeral. He came home in a bag
That may have mixed in pieces of his squad.
Yes, I can write about a lot of things
Besides the summer that I turned sixteen.
But that's my ground swell. I must start
Where things began to happen and I knew it.

From Questions for Ecclesiastes published by Story Line Press, 1997. Copyright © 1997 by Mark Jarman. All rights reserved. Used with permission.

Jeffers

To raise a stump of rock into a tower, rolling a stone
in place as the years pass.
Strangers who only know your silhouette bid it farewell and
travel to Japan,
Cross China, venture into India, to Europe, and, changed
by time and space,
Sail home over the bulging eye of ocean only to see, when
landfall looms in view,
The stump of rock--your tower--on the headland, and you there,
rolling a stone in place,
The edifice apparently no taller, as if each night you had
dismantled it
And every day had raised it up again. To know, only in
completion, the nisus
That dominates the spider when it spins, the bird building
its nest, the gray whale
Turning toward Mexico and the sea lion clambering up shingle
toward its mate--
The nisus of cairn-building, rock-piling, mortaring stone has
dominated you.
It dominates the reader bent above the book, poised like a
stork hunting; like sleep,
It is an utter unity of will and action, known--at least by
man or woman--
Only when it is over. And when the work is over--tower
building, poem writing--
You hear gulls cry and see them kiting at the bull terrier
out in the garden.
He has snatched up some strip of bloody fur they meant to mince
with beaks. Best to detach it
From his jaws, let gulls eat refuse like that. Go out into
the damp twilight, feel
The chill along the arms, through cloth, and take the petty
morsel from the pet dog, toss it
To the scolding gulls, down the rocky bank beyond the garden.
And lead the dog to food
Inside the kitchen. Enter, expecting to see the woman, the two
sons, and your place at table,
Waiting. And find you are alone. Even the dog at heel--
vanished. The stone house
Glumly dark and a dumb cold coming from its walls, that only
whiskey cuts.
The cold and dark conceal much, and memory must be evoked
to penetrate them.
Meanwhile, they are the elements that starlight loves.
Clear cold, pure darkness, outside the window,
Beside the guestbed, where you have planned to lie at last,
viewing the pure, clear stars without
Obstruction by the crude suburban dwellings--that absurd roof,
down there, like a coal scoop,
And the spite fences either side your property. Nothing
in creation shows
More the supreme indifference to humanity, despite the patterns
of the zodiac.
The stars, like bits of crystal ground into a griststone's
granite rim, are small themselves.
Only the surrounding emptiness is great. Take comfort in the
emptiness; lie down.
The drink will help you sleep awhile alone, without her, until
that section of the night
You've come to know--that region you once sailed through
peacefully, worn out by work and love.
Now, stranded there till dawn, sleepless, it will not matter
that you foresaw the planet's end
Or our end on the planet. Only sleep will matter. At that
hour, in those conditions,
Just out of reach, receding like the dark itself as daylight
pushes in, sleep only
Will be the thing you want. Powerless to attain what you
desire, yet bitterly
Desiring at all costs. Perhaps, then, memory, not starlight,
will intercede,
And the stone house gather warmth from its hearth fire, and
loved ones reappear, and you will sleep.

From Iris, published by Story Line Press, 1992. Copyright © 1992 by Mark Jarman. All rights reserved. Used with permission.

Descriptions of Heaven and Hell
 

The wave breaks
And I'm carried into it.
This is hell, I know,
Yet my father laughs,
Chest-deep, proving I'm wrong.
We're safely rooted,
Rocked on his toes.

Nothing irked him more
Than asking, "What is there
Beyond death?"
His theory once was
That love greets you,
And the loveless
Don't know what to say.

From The Rote Walker, published by Carnegie-Mellon University Press, 1981. Copyright © 1981 by Mark Jarman. All rights reserved. Used with permission.