The Archeology of a Small-town
Massachusetts Life
keith harmon snow
Massachusetts, April 2005
(A declined submission to THE SUN Magazine,
with Post Script October 2005)
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eslieÕs
dead. ItÕs fifteen below zero. Ghost is on the porch, shivering in the excitement of stalking the
squirrels under the bird feeder. Still a young cat at six months, Ghost is the only thing at LeslieÕs old house that does
not reek of decay or entropy. His being is still unfolding, a little white joy
on four legs. He freezes, one leg in mid-air, when the squirrels look up, and
then he advances, in inches. Dad and I watch him from the kitchen as he plots a
massacre.
In the whiteness of the blizzard, and in the
sunshine after, the white Ghost
is invisible. ItÕs only when he looks at you that you see him – and then
you see that he has one blue eye and one green, and in these eyes a look of
innocent wonder. The squirrels are alert, they clutch their seeds and split
them on hind legs, and one day Ghost will fly off the porch and sink his teeth into a squirrel and the
blood will spurt out and freeze bright red on the white snow and on the snow
white face of Ghost. The world
stops for Ghost when he sees a
squirrel; raw instinct overpowers his consciousness, kind of like truth and
justice blinded by a flag.
Dad calls him Mouser Cats and when he hollers: ÒWhereÕs the mouser of the
houser?Ó Ghost comes running.
To me he has always been the Ghost.
Equally inquisitive as frightened by my arrival -- a stranger coming out of the
winter snow into the heated refuge of LeslieÕs haunted house – he now
climbs into my lap and drapes his body over my arm while I write. Maybe he
remembers me.
ÒEveryone wants that cat when I leave,Ó dad tells
me. (I had instantly decided Ghost
would be mine.) Leslie died two weeks before I came and so Dad will have to
leave this house in a few months. ÒBut I donÕt know what IÕm going to do,Ó he
says. ÒI wonÕt take the cat with me.Ó
Ghost
came from me. Last summer I let a homeless man I know pitch a tent in the field
where I run an organic garden. Tim was a 24 year-old nomad, and he reminded me
of me at 19. He was living on the streets of Northampton, two kittens in a
brown paper bag, and one day I picked him and a girl up hitchhiking, two
kittens in a brown paper bag. He showed up in our field and pitched a tent,
ready to change the world. The kittens adopted me while Tim was at work each
day, sleeping in my teepee and hanging out with the summer interns and pooping
in the ashes of the fire pit. I told Tim to take some responsibility; that
coyotes will eat the kittens, that they need a home and my teepee isnÕt it. He disappeared after that,
on the bicycle I gave him, abandoning kittens and tent and rotting food and
pornography -- and the other refuse of his alcoholism. When I left for Congo I
gave the kittens to dad, and he brought them here to Leslie.
This was Leslie MitchellÕs old house. Dad moved in
after LeslieÕs stroke, to keep Leslie from hurting himself in exchange for a
bed in the house and a workshop in the barn. LeslieÕs cousin Paul didnÕt know
what to do with Leslie, and so he was overjoyed to have dad move in. The place
was a dump. Dad cleared a path through the living room, recovered the kitchen
and, in time, placated the state social welfare agents so that Leslie could
return from the hospital. Coming home a confused and fragile man, Leslie
shuffled about, moving junk from one pile to another, dismantling things. Dad
didnÕt have his own room until Leslie died. Before that he lived in his van.
I met Leslie last summer. He was soft and gentle
and happy, always hovering around like someone who doesnÕt know how to behave.
He was a gaunt, bony man -- he was a skinny kid too – with chalk white
skin and eye sockets deep and hollow but there was nothing ghostly about him.
The light in his eyes at the end of his life, when I knew him, was lovely. He
was like an 85 year-old baby, but one who could recite the history of every
piece of rusted junk and mechanical widget on his property.
They made an interesting team, dad and Leslie, a
couple of refugees dependent on each other. They had a lot in common. ÒLeslie
had to take everything apart,Ó Dad says, Òhe couldnÕt leave ANY-thing alone.Ó Dad often dismantles things, jumps
from one reconstruction to the next, loses irreplaceable parts and abandons the
project in frustration. Like father, like son.
Dad still rants about LeslieÕs craziness -- another
excuse to work himself into a fury. I try to just breathe through or even laugh
at my dadÕs anger, and I say something like: ÒDonÕt waste your energy. LeslieÕs
dead. His ghost is laughing at you.Ó Sometimes my dadÕs projections push me
over the edge – whatever heÕs angry at usually has nothing to do with me
-- and I give his energy right back at him.
They had other things in common, like old flywheel
engines and a mania for old engine shows. They lived symbiotically, inhabiting
the margins of society amidst the eccentric privilege of buying and selling
archaic machines and antique widgets and other cultural waste. At least, thatÕs
what it is to me, though it might hurt dadÕs feelings to say it, even if I love
surfing the junk culture too. There isnÕt much else they could do, exiled and
discarded by the system of planned obsolescence we inhabit.
Last spring dad ordered 100 baby chicks from the
Murray McMurray Chicken Hatchery in Iowa, and he and Leslie built a chicken
coop and shared the fun of watching them feather out into birds of every breed
and color. But the chicken project disintegrated -- death by entropy or
attrition -- and the remaining birds became a burden. Butchering chickens is no
picnic (my cousin and I once tried to hang a chicken instead). ÒWe gave some
chickens away, we killed a few, but wild animals got most of them,Ó dad tells
me, on the drive home from Logan airport.
And then they had these kittens. Leslie was
overjoyed, he loved animals, but cancer came into his body like winter came
into this house, and he died the second of January. ÒYou have become the nurse
of a dying man,Ó I wrote, emailing dad from Congo. Three weeks later I am
living in a dead mansÕ house, sleeping in my hi-tech sleeping bag on the floor.
When he gets lonely, Ghost
crawls in and sidles up to my ribs to escape the frozen night, and Dad, under
an electric blanket, snores like a drowning whale.
CONGO
I was working in Gabon when dad emailed to say that
Leslie was on his way out. I had malaria, and by the time I crossed little
Congo to Congo-Kinshasa my malaria was raging, the corruption had broken my
spirit, and Leslie was dead. I pulled into my shell like a refugee. I flew
Kinshasa to Nairobi, and then, after six days in bed and the
never-never-luxuries of western airports, I arrived here. I didnÕt come home
because Leslie died, but to withdraw from the suffering.
I arrived in Kinshasa in September, hopeful and
excited, and the drive from the airport to the city frightened me. ItÕs a war
zone, KinshasaÕs airport road, and it belies understanding to anyone who does
not live it, and probably to those who do. ItÕs horrible, a waste-land,
swarming with people poor and destitute, people in nice suits who own nothing
but one nice suit, refugees going nowhere, or anywhere, in a ÒcountryÓ raped by
outsiders from the moment they saw
it. And then there are the soldiers.
You canÕt imagine the misery or brutality that war,
poverty and globalization have brought on the Congolese, and no matter what
youÕve read or seen you canÕt begin to understand Congo until you arrive. But
the pathos is universal: you can live in the U.S. and with eyes wide open
youÕll find meaningless suffering all around you. There is continuity between
life there and here, all things are connected, what goes around comes
around.
A faded, mustard yellow, board-and-baton house with
red trim windows all around, LeslieÕs old haunt is near frozen solid and winter
is winning. The water comes from a natural spring behind the house and it was
pouring through the open tap in the kitchen – until yesterday. It entered
the house in a black plastic hose, as it has for a hundred years, and while it
ran fast out of the tap it couldnÕt freeze. But yesterday it stopped. We were
sitting here in the kitchen. Dad was too worried to say anything.
I took a light to the cellar and skated over the
pile of shiny black coal coated with ice and banged my head on a rotting beam
and shook and bent the plastic hose. But the freeze moved up the pipe like a
crack in the mountain, and now there is no water until spring. The toilet froze
soon after (but donÕt tell anyone, the health department will evict us). ÒYou
can stay with people you know,Ó dad says, Òbut I donÕt have any choices.Ó
I love my dad. His future scares me. He isnÕt
healthy, here today, ghost tomorrow, and itÕs a blessing to spend time with
him, no matter his demons, but IÕm afraid he will end up like Leslie or, worse,
that he will slip on the ice and die – alone and frozen. Anyways, this
house is so isolated and winter so cold in the shadow of the mountain -- and
the Congo was so hot and trying on me -- that I am overjoyed to come back to this. In many ways, I love it. ItÕs not because of
dads' cooking.
ItÕs an adventure, this old house -- yet another jungle -- a
dilapidated sarcophagus of historical artifacts and absurd ÒnecessitiesÓ and
timeless anachronisms. ItÕs an archeological expedition, a time capsule
revealing the unraveling of a human life, and the raveling of it. It fascinates me: itÕs my little study
in madness and pathos -- in a man, in a life – and a testimonial to the
wonder of life and the inevitability of death. It humbles me as I piece
LeslieÕs life together like a puzzle from the rubble. Exploring this old house
is like exploring an exotic culture, but one that I am unexpectedly living.
ItÕs no accident I land here after reporting on war in Congo.
But the two rooms we inhabit are stifled by the
roar of the oil furnace mounted next to the kitchen sink, when it blows heat,
and by the icy wind that penetrates this house when it doesnÕt. The fourteen
rooms, cellar and attic are frozen, caked with filth, heaped with rubbish and
buried treasure. Winter took the house by storm, driving Leslie and dad into
these now pipe-frozen rooms, and because clean water was such a challenge in
Congo I find it ironic that three days after I am ÒhomeÓ we have none. The
people in Congo suffer through, living and dying with scarcity and disease.
Leslie somehow dealt with it for years.
THE PINK GRANITE
Leslie Mitchell was born in this
house in 1919 and his sister Ida in 1915, in the days when the blacksmith Dr.
E.H. Alvord charged 40 cents to shoe a horse. Ida worked in a local mill,
supporting Leslie after their parents died, until she died in 1993. Her clothes
hang in a decrepit bedroom upstairs, in plastic zip-up sheaths, some like new,
50 years old. Leslie and Ida never married or lived anywhere else. LeslieÕs
father Frank was adopted, and LeslieÕs grandfather John lived here too. Like
Leslie, they all died in this house. I often feel like IÕm being watched.
The house at 850 Chester Road sits on the old Pony
Express trail from Boston to Albany, in Becket, a typical ex-mill town in
Massachusetts. The stagecoach road grew into U.S. 20, a highway parallel to
Walker Brook and the tracks of the Boston & Albany Railroad. LeslieÕs uncle
drove train for the B&A from 1905 to 1954, and the house is a few miles up
U.S. 20 from the Chester depot. Walker Brook babbles under a bridge out front,
and thatÕs where a car ran over a black cat named Zeus -- GhostÕs brother.
The Home Insurance Company of New
York assessed the house at $800 in 1914 (Annual policy: $15.60). From 1921 the
Mitchell family ran the Berkshire Pink Granite Company out of a hole in the
backyard. Everything was mortgaged to a stranger who in October 1943 authorized
LeslieÕs father Frank Mitchell to clear-cut the hemlock forest out back. Seems
Frank Mitchell may have been a drinker. Whiskey bottles and flasks stand in
corners of the house, tucked under floorboards and behind clocks, but Leslie
and Ida were religiously sober, and the flasks are full of kerosene.
ROLLY THE BULLY
In June 1954, a Òshyster from the cityÓ conned Frank
MitchellÕs widow Inez into signing over control of the Berkshire Pink Granite
Co. Louis J. Rolly Òmolested and bulliedÓ Leslie like a slave to fill his
orders for Berkshire Pink, even driving fragile old Inez to help Leslie run the
quarryÕs mammoth derrick, but after a few weeks of abuse LeslieÕs mom retained
a lawyer. Inez paid $1000 to settle with Òthe despicable Mr. Rolly.Ó She wrote
a dozen pages of notes telling the story. ItÕs a simplistic account formatted
like a Victorian novel with summary headers like: ÒLOUIS J. ROLLYÕS AGREEMENT,
AND HOW THIS CLAIMANT LURED THE MITCHELL PINK GRANITE OWNERS TO SIGN THROUGH
FALSE PROCEDURE AND THE EVIL RESULTS THAT FOLLOWED.Ó
Pink granite sold for two bucks a
ton in the ground in 1954. Quarried, it sold for 100 bucks a ton in 1965, but
the quarry was abandoned before that, thanks to the Rolly debacle. The quarry
is invisible now, the familyÕs Õ41 Cadillac sunk in a bog out back and, like
everything else, overgrown with hemlocks and home to wild critters.
YouÕll find ÒBerkshire PinkÓ behind the white paint
on CharlieÕs Garage. With its red flying horse trademark, CharlieÕs is a gas
station where you imagine they once had busty female attendants in matching
jumpsuits and toothbrite smiles – fictional heroes like Rosie the Riveter
doing their part for America. Such advertising inventions fill the LOOK
and LIFE magazines scattered about LeslieÕs house and, for me, these are
the beginnings of the big lie – color public relations adverts with gas
station attendants joyfully wiping windshields and peddling petroleum to a
brave new world. ItÕs not surprising that these old ads proliferate as
collectibles -- like Norman Rockwell images – cycled and recycled into
the mainstream to accentuate the hopeful side of the American dream and the
illusions of ÒprogressÓ.
I bought into these images. There was always some little ghost
whispering confusion in my ear, but I was 35 before the ugly truth shone
through the shiny veneers of propaganda. Shiny sun, shiny grass, shiny sky
– shiny new car – and everyone lives happily more-ever-for.
Quality, dependability, service with a smile -- from someone who knows your
name and something, anything, about what it means to be you. Everyone is taken
care of (by big brother oil). I wish I lived in the Ô50Õs.
I live in an era where everything happens too fast,
and it is the era of sophisticated and seemingly futuristic aerospace and weapons technologies and
unaccountable ÒconvenienceÓ corporations peddling everything from plastic
Barbies and Coca Cola to petroleum. My every day life is characterized by rapid technological changes, changes occurring at a rate
far more accelerated than the rate of human adaptability, and beyond the
capacity for any organized or thoughtful societal response. ItÕs overwhelming.
No one knows my name, and they wouldnÕt think to ask.
People talk on cellphones everywhere, connected
through billion dollar geosynchronous satellites, ignoring the beings in their
immediate orbit. Innocent men, women and children who have not used a telephone
in their entire life – you know, the landline kind -- are slaughtered in
Congo to bring me a handy cellphone.
War is not a pretty subject. Imperialism is messy.
Exposing the involvement of U.S. soldiers in Congo -- or unmanned aerospace
PREDATOR ÒdronesÓ over Darfur, Sudan -- does not go over well. Silence is a
powerful force in America, and itÕs easier to uphold it than to break it.
Freedom of speech is one thing, but freedom to hear is another, and Americans
have a fear of hearing. ItÕs a problem for me, I admit: I donÕt want to hear
what I donÕt want to hear. Neither do I know how to say what needs be said.
Like the things buried under the cultural refuse in
LeslieÕs house, the American past and present are taboo – PandoraÕs boxes
that people seal and store away in the attics of their psyches out of guilt or
fear or shame. Best rent a large dumpster, or bulldoze the ugly realities into
a hole, like nuclear waste or PCBÕs, or bodies after a massacre. That happened
in Congo: Americans helped cover it up, with bulldozers.
The Mitchell house is packed with trash and
antiques, little treasures and ornate furniture and decaying refuse buried
under rats-nest clothing and peeling wallpaper and the plaster of crumbling
ceilings. Ghost literally flies
around the house climbing the walls, and heÕll suddenly vanish into the chaos
and cold silence upstairs. The light is diffuse and shadowy in the smudge of
broken windows taped together or boarded over, and when Ghost appears heÕs like an apparition coming out of the
fog.
Leslie abandoned these rooms years ago. I imagine
them slowly claimed by entropy, one-by-one, after Ida died, as loneliness and
inertia crept into LeslieÕs bones. There are pails of coal and open jugs of
kerosene in the hallways. Doors will swing open and creek, some Ghost peeking around from behind them.
Everything smells like raccoons.
Leslie had his collections. His plastic airplane
and ship models remain in original boxes, parts stamped out in hard plastic
templates waiting to be broken out and glued together by some little boy who
will dream all the while about combat heroics. ThatÕs the symbolism Hollywood
dumps on us. ItÕs not just a job, itÕs an adventure, and a kid sits for hours
assembling the fantasy. I imagined whole wars when I was a kid.
Leslie has the P-38 Lockheed Lightning; the C-47 Skytrain; the B-240 Liberator; BoeingÕs B-52 Stratofortress and B-29 Superfortress; and a B-36 Peacemaker. I had my G.I. JoeÕs and little
plastic army-men (grey Germans and green Americans) and as a ten-year-old I
proudly spewed obscure war trivia gleaned from the standard American war
mythology. Battleship was my favorite war toy, but there were never any innocent victims,
and nobodyÕs blood was spilled.
My great uncle worked at General Electric Ordinance
in Pittsfield, making bombs I guess. Like Ida Mitchell he spent half his waking
life sitting at a machine, stamping out profits for The Company. After 35 years
they gave him a pension and a piece of wood with a ÒTHANK YOUÓ stamped in
brass. Dad serviced the turbines of the B-29 as a mechanic in the Air Force,
based in Bermuda, during the Korean War. I worked four years for GE Aerospace
on the ÒStar WarsÓ hoax peddled by a Hollywood actor named Ronald Reagan.
(ReaganÕs Secretary of State, former U.S. General Alexander Haig, is on the
board of directors of Metro-Goldwyn-Meyer, a billion dollar enterprise that
imagineered Black Hawk Down and Hotel Rwanda.)
The instruction sheets inside the boxes of LeslieÕs
models deify these weapons, but thereÕs no meaningful context and, by default,
they celebrate the cult of war without explaining the political economy of
military commercialism. There is no moral inquisition, or any kind of ethical
exploration. I used to be furious about this. Then I was disgusted. Now I laugh
at the foolishness of it all, in a Buddhist sense, and I try to write about it.
All things passÉ so will the United States. The question is, how soon?
ÒOn the morning of August 6th, 1945,Ó
the sheet for the B-29 reads, Òa single B-29 dropped the worldÕs first nuclear
weapon on the city of Hiroshima. The awesome explosion heralded the dawn of the
nuclear age, and the end of the war for Japan.Ó But the first nuclear weapons
were used against the rural folks of Utah and Nevada my history tells me. And
Japan was ready to surrender before the A-bombs were dropped. I think the ÒAÒ
in A-bomb must be for ANYWAY because thatÕs how we bombed them. The uranium for
the A-bombs was mined in the Belgian Congo and, anyway, thereÕs nothing to
celebrate about nuclear annihilation.
The B-29 carried 20,000 pounds of ordinance (bombs)
per plane in sorties against Korea the sheet says. But the B-29 ÒSuperfortsÓ
were not used to defend democracy from communism, as we are told, but to
strategically destabilize the peninsula under a hostile U.S. military and
economic domination that continues today. So the ÒBÓ in B-29 must be for bifurcate, because thatÕs what we did to
Korea and its people. Or maybe itÕs a ÒBÓ for bottom line – because
thatÕs what itÕs all about, as far as I can see, no longer blinded by a $42,000
annual salary from GE Aerospace.
ÒThereÕs a B-52 Superfortress by Monogram Models on e-bay for $34.99,Ó dad
discovers. It seems to me that these models are coveted by adults who have
never grown up -- or maybe itÕs the American cult of leisure time: people
sitting around watching ÒFriendsÓ while piecing together a plastic 1/72
scale-model of a 50 million dollar weapon-of-mass destructionÉ maybe thatÕs why
thereÕs so much violence in America, and why violence has become our primary
export. Maybe thatÕs why ÒtheyÓ hate us.
What is maturity? Is it paying the bills? Holding
down a job? Is it the capacity to love? To share? To forgive? Is it the courage
to feel? To let go? Somewhere I read that we may have to experience having before we can experience letting go. So why do we all hold on to things as we do? Why
do Americans accumulate so much worthless junk? Why are there so many lonely
Leslies and Idas living amongst us?
And why do the people of the Congo have nothing? I
mean it: nothing. Imagine no
possessionsÉ Average income in parts of rural Congo is less than 54 dollars a
year. People I met earn less than three dollars a nmonth working on plantations
owned by American businessmen. Isolated and terrorized by war, some Congolese I
spoke with believed that Mobutu Sese Seko was still the President! IÕm looking
at LeslieÕs refuse thinking: so many people have nothing there, and we all have
so much, and it seems like every Congolese I met thinks that Americans like you
and me are going to save them. Since 1960 itÕs only changed for the worse in
Congo. Western stories about Congo often invoke the symbology of broken clocks
to underscore the supposed hopelessness and the inevitable decay and the
reversal of progress in the absence of the colonial benefactors. Time stands still in Congo, but for the dying.
Leslie was obsessed with time: clocks from every
era of American mass production animate the old house. ÒLeslie could fix any
clock in the world,Ó says the owner of CharlieÕs Garage, Òif you had all the
time in the world to wait.Ó
In LeslieÕs clock repair room, clocks sit on
shelves like dolls waiting for someone to wind them up and love them.
Everywhere are disemboweled clocks, piles of gears, springs, pendulums, and
other innards, some rusting and broken, some shiny and oiled, and there are
clock faces and clock face stencils. The mice inhabit this clock world: little
black turds are everywhere. Ghost
inspects the coils and springs with his pink nose, and he jumps backwards when
they release or unwind.
The clocks in our ÒbedroomÓ chime and gong all
night, and because Leslie tinkered with everything no two clocks operate in
sync: midnight arrives for hours. Some clocks tick backwards. Others have no
hands, no feet, no faces. They all chime and tick out of order, no common
rhythm, an asynchronous chaos. The metaphor isnÕt lost on me, my body still
arriving ÒhomeÓ after four months in Africa; my soul lingering behind me; my
psyche struggling to integrate the realities of war and suffering, the shifting
time zones, and the desperation amidst the affluence, which is a universal
constant.
In the corner of the parlor in a 1950Õs photo
youÕll see the Replogle 10-inch Precision Globe designed and edited by Gustav Bruechmann,
Cartographer, Chicago Illinois, which I find in LeslieÕs bedroom. BruechmannÕs
world has an Africa run by Europeans -- and that special breed of whites in
Rhodesia -- and Congo is a satellite of Belgium, a hopeful country with a
bright future, with functioning infrastructure and nice cities named for the
conquerors, and there is a boy there named Patrice Lumumba who will be
assassinated ten years down the road.
Maps in Congo today come from NASA and USAID. The
Congolese have no say in how their land is re-presented – they have never
seen the computer-generated maps developed by satellite remote-sensing of their
environment, and they never will -- and it is through high-tech modern day maps
that the conquest of the Congo proceeds, in earnest, under the philanthropic
banners of democracy and development. But we are taking the raw materials out
of Congo, and using them to wage war on others, to build our houses and our
cities and fill them with meaningless junk that, in our lostness, we shackle
our souls with.
LeslieÕs house is full of dated newspapers whose
headlines chronicle the legacy of media-driven fear in the U.S. The Springfield
Union, April 3, 1969: ÒBlack Panthers Seized in N.Y.
Terrorist Plot.Ó The Berkshire Eagle, November 4, 1967: ÒSoviets Testing Orbital Nuclear Bomb.Ó The
Westfield News, November 22, 1972:
ÒSaigon: U.S. Loses Fourth F-111 in 72 Hours.Ó Substitute ÒAl-QuidaÓ or ÒArabÓ for ÒPantherÓ or ÒRedÓ or
ÒViet CongÓ, and replace J. Edgar Hoover and Joe McCarthy with Donald Rumsfeld
and Dick Cheney, and you get todayÕs news stories.
The Ô72 Westfield News has a page one snapshot of a young Ralph Nader
with the caption ÒNader Nudges PressÓ – an unthinkable possibility today.
ÒConsumer Advocate Ralph Nader in a speech before the National Press Club in
Washington today urged the news media to stop focusing on Ôthe pirouettingÕ of
politicians and concentrate on the real issues facing Congress. Nader urged the
media to question politicians sharply in public, not simply report political
punditry.Ó
Imagine that! Ralph Nader on page one! Imagine
this: the media questioning politicians sharply! IÕve never seen anyone in the media question a politician sharply.
Instead I see newspapers spilling with the symbolism that breeds fear and
confusion, the language that peddles pointless junk, the ideology that shackles
a misguided people to a permanent warfare economy.
Admittedly, IÕm an extremist. I would have been a
black panther. IÕm still a Red (because I always vote for Nader) and IÕm going
to learn Arabic just becauseÉ
Indeed, snooping in LeslieÕs refuse heap I unearth what looks to me like the
roots of the contemporary American xenophobia and sexual intrigue with all
things Arabian. Volume 55, Number 12 of The Gentlewoman -- A Magazine
of Feminine Facts and Fiction that
sold for 5 cents in 1926 -- tells an Orientalist tale about a beautiful English woman and a
mysterious Arab sheik; the willful but lascivious white woman who succumbs to
the demands of a virile and mysterious stranger who rides out of the desert on
a white steed and has her,
against her will. And then she falls in love with him, of courseÉ
This is an early American rape-fantasy, and itÕs
about a wild, dark-skinned Arab on a horse – sound familiar? The woman is
every woman, and she is –
ultimately – a whore who subliminally wants to be fucked even when she
says ÒNoÓ, and itÕs no wonder that rape in the U.S. is out of control and the
sexual violence in Congo is out of this world. Rape is a tactic that rips apart
the fabric of human life, and itÕs not accidental that the unprecedented sexual
violence in Congo goes mostly unreported, and the ghosts in the machine will one
day come to light.
If LeslieÕs ghost is here, itÕs hovering around his
exotic butterflies and moths. Cases of pin-pithed butterflies under glass cover
the walls of the old parlor, hundreds of rare and fantastic species you have
never seen alive, and never will again. Stacked on shelves upstairs are 1930Õs
Havana cigar boxes with more butterflies suspended on pins. On huge sheets of
plywood Leslie traced and painted butterflies with four-foot wingspans. He
bought mail-order butterfly eggs and hatched them and collected the adults with
nets and traps. In cheap Kodachromes excavated from the ruins you see Leslie
and Ida standing in the flowers they grew to attract butterflies. I love that
side of Leslie -- he was so gloriously enraptured by the pandemonium of these
delicate winged beings. ItÕs a shame he had to kill them to enjoy them.
ÒLeslie told me he was responsible for the spread
of the gypsy moth in the northeastern United States,Ó dad says. The gypsy moth
is one of those alien invaders like water hyacinth and kudzu and genetically
modified corn. ÒHe bought all these Gypsy moth eggs by mail and hatched them
and he believed the Gypsy moth invasion was all his fault.Ó
Old photos show Leslie collecting butterflies in
the early 1940Õs. Letters to Ida from her suitors – envelopes cacheted
WORKING FOR VICTORY that were passed postage-free by military censors –
show that while other local boys his age were off fighting the wars that
enriched American businessmen, skinny Leslie Mitchell was slicing his pink
granite and chasing his flying rainbows. IdaÕs favored suitor, Pfc. William
Dalton, wrote steady until 1944, but letters stopped suddenly, and I imagine
that her Òbosom BillyÓ married a bullet. Some letters suggest a virtuous
virginity in Ida – maybe she never had a man just as Leslie never had a
woman – but the bibles by the beds were hardly opened. I imagine Ida
coming home from the factory every day, rocking her chair, re-reading old
letters from soldiers and girlfriends bemoaning the hardships of motherhood
– Òno man in my bed, for the warÓ wrote one – while war and typhoid
and the grippe took her friends
and neighbors in the prime of their life. Leslie was drafted too, and maybe his
skinniness kept him out of the war, and maybe the Draft Board thought butterfly
chasers donÕt make good soldiers.
I imagine Leslie in his teens and twenties, excited
by the prospect of courting local beauties, but dad and I find only one clue to
LeslieÕs romantic pursuits: a confused and resentful note from a rejected
suitor to a girl caught holding hands with another; pressed inside is a
butterfly with blue iridescent wings flattened by the weight of time. Leslie
was likely a mamaÕs boy pampered by Ida and the phantom females seen in old
photos. ÒI think Leslie was very spoiled,Ó dad says. Ida described him as
Òhopelessly chivalrous,Ó and she told one friend that ÒLeslie will never find a
nice girlÓ in rural Becket.
With his butterflies and his gardens, and some
poultry and ducks he was fond of, Leslie lived out the twentieth century on the
wings of increasing loneliness. I imagine that he was disappointed, and I canÕt
imagine never having a lover, and we donÕt always miss what we never had. But
the bright, shiny future and cosmopolitan society promised by the sponsors of
the Ed Sullivan Show and the adverts in the popular journals that monthly
arrived in the mail passed by 850 Chester Road like an express train on the B
& A rail. With his family dying off around him, and in the absence of wife
and children, Leslie fussed with old engines and tinkered with time machines
and pressed his love affair with Lepidoptera.
LesliesÕ kin want to donate the butterfly
collection to a museum. I search the web looking for a home, an institution
offering some hope for situating these thousands of winged wonders -- pithed
for perpetuity -- in an appropriate context, one that honestly addresses the
ravages of nature we are seeing, the political economy of environmentalism, the
greenwashing. Museums cater to their sponsors, and their customers, the public
at leisure, and controversy is off the menu. IÕd like to see LeslieÕs
butterflies in a museum where truth predominates over interests. I canÕt find
one.
Leslie might have liked to see his butterflies in
the Smithsonian, and the collection is surely grand enough for that. While
working in Gabon recently I learned that armies of Smithsonian researchers were
descending on GabonÕs National Parks and slaughtering thousands of creatures,
in the name of science, through the barbaric Darwinian practice of collecting.
I was horrified to see frogs and snakes and soggy little rodentia suspended forever in jars of 70% alcohol. Over 400
birds were massacred at one site alone. The Smithsonian morgue is not the perfect
home for LeslieÕs butterflies, IÕve decided, and Leslie – now in the
spirit world – probably knows that. In the end, the family will deal with
it, and, like so many things that I care about in this world, IÕll have to let
the butterflies go.
Ghost
is sitting on the TV peering out the kitchen window. When he sees a squirrel he
rises up on his back legs like they do. Dad is cooking meatloaf, and he swears
into the refrigerator now and then. The phone doesnÕt work when it storms, and
so we have no phone, no Internet and no e-Bay today. My cross-country skis are
broken and itÕs getting dark, and IÕve been sitting here with cold feet and
stiff neck thinking about karma and serendipity, and wondering if the souls of
all those butterflies are haunting Leslie now. When I get restless I explore
this frozen house.
What a jumble my life is, but it is the tenuous
thread that connects the Congo to the Mitchell mansion. ItÕs the beingness of
me. I am learning to negotiate the groundlessness of the little patch of
universe I inhabit. My genocide investigations, the interviews of rape
survivors, the malaria, the corruption, the discombobulating travel from Congo
to Massachusetts, the arrival here, at the house of a dead man, the isolation
and loneliness of the American wayÉ I wonder sometimes who I am, where I am
going, what awaits me when I get there. This is not a physical place; itÕs a
spiritual one. It terrifies me that the place I arrive at may be unfamiliar and
that I may be the only one there when I arrive, but itÕs a journey, an
exploration, maybe even a pilgrimage. If IÕm the only one there, maybe others
will join me. And maybe I have to be alone. And this is the most terrifying
thought: maybe IÕm the one thatÕs lost.
I no longer feel that I have a home, a sense of
place, and sometimes I feel that every place is my home. My dad is brilliant,
he can do anything he puts his mind to, but heÕs also stuck, and I havenÕt
figured out how to unstick him. Or, well, itÕs his choice. He chooses his realities,
just like I do. ItÕs hard to think about him being alone, but thereÕs been
times when heÕs too hard to be around, and so IÕve had to stay away. I often
remind myself that his dad died in a boating accident when he was nine, and how
hard it must have been to live out that journey. Leslie had his journey, dad
his, me mineÉ
Dad says to me from his bed tonight: ÒI love having
you around. Leslie went so quickly. One day heÕs walking around doing great and
two weeks later heÕs dead.Ó ThereÕs a long pause, as if dadÕs fallen asleep,
and then he says: ÒIt really affected me. Life is too short and mine is getting
shorter. ItÕs all happening so fast, and I donÕt know where my life went.
Really, I donÕt know what happened to it, you have no idea.Ó
ItÕs true, and itÕs a fundamental lesson I have yet
to fully embrace: I have no idea what other people have lived through, the
ghosts that haunt them, how hard it is for them to be. I have my own ideas, my own stuckness, and my own
unsticking to do. Again, IÕm told, itÕs all about choices.
Dad sits in front of his Sylvania with a web-TV
keyboard and clicker, searching out deals on e-Bay, every so often pointing out
the latest intelligence hoax by Donald Rumsfeld or some other agent of a
machine world that throws a few measly scraps to war veterans and a monthly
social security check to discarded cogs, but could care less if my dad lives or
dies, or how. Like Leslie, dad is a refugee in his own culture. I canÕt help
but feel that IÕm not far behind.
Sitting here in LeslieÕs old house IÕm watching Ghost on the porch but IÕm rooting for the squirrels. I
wonder if LeslieÕs ghost is watching me -- a trespasser in the Mitchell
mansion? This place was the one stable anchor in LeslieÕs life, something he
could always count on, and come back to, both sanctuary and escape. It was
home. So many people IÕve met in Congo have no prospect of ÒhomeÓ – and
there are children who have never known a home, just as this is all Leslie ever
knew.
IÕm homeless, car-less, credit-card-less,
partner-less – and IÕve never felt more whole. A lot of personal
suffering and hard work have taught me to dance on shaky ground, that I can hop
and skip over the cracks, or fall in; that I can gaze into the unfathomable
abyss of suffering with as much hope and wonder as I gaze at LeslieÕs
butterflies. I wish my dad could dance with the cosmos, just a little, and
surrender into the frustration, and maybe let a few tears trickle out of his
eyes now and then and crack the walls of control that are eating him alive. If
he cried in this house his tears would freeze before they hit the ground, but
there is incredible beauty in the short, sweet life of icicles.
My teachers tell me that surrender is the secret.
Letting go of control and the idea that I know what to do next. I donÕt. But I
refuse to live like a machine. People ask me ÒWhat do you think youÕre doing
investigating human rights in Congo?Ó – really itÕs more a demand than a
question. Others insist that I canÕt make a difference and, worse, that itÕs not
fair to bring hope to trauma survivors I have interviewed. But I do the best I
can, and I have to believe in my self, and thereÕs nothing wrong with spreading
a little hope. I quote Gandhi in the face of this dismissive hopelessness:
ÒEverything you do will be meaningless, but you must do it.Ó
LeslieÕs 1972 Westfield News also quotes Gandhi, in a tiny page one clip called
ÒTodayÕs thought.Ó I see this newspaper as a mouthpiece for Westover Air Force
Base nearby, and IÕm never surprised to find a quote by Gandhi, a pillar of
non-violence, adopted by the war machine: ÒIt is my certain conviction that no
man loses his freedom except through his own weakness.Ó
Right: the corollary is: WAR = FREEDOM.
I love my freedom, and IÕm learning to love the
mystery. I wonder if Leslie felt that way? How much of his life was a choice?
How much circumstance? I wonder if he cried when he was alone, like I do, when
it gets hard, or if he just turned his heart off, like so many Americans, and
went about his business, shields up.
We donÕt have to live like refugees.
ItÕs a symptom of my affluence that I am shedding
possessions while the people I meet in Congo want everything I have. IÕm a
nomad. ItÕs my choice. ItÕs an existence thatÕs liberating when you are strong,
terrifying when you are weak, and it is an unshakeable faith that makes the difference. I have my share of
terror. I have no allegiance to this government or the boundaries of this
nation, or any other, because they have no allegiance to me, and LeslieÕs
universe made that clear. This phantom called globalization destroys nomads, because nomads donÕt shop at the
local Wal-Mart – they barter their wares in the expedience of survival.
ItÕs not unusual, on the other hand, to find a Coke machine in the desert, and
thatÕs the hypocrisy of it all. Nomads have babies in sand dunes or mud, and
they cook their dinners over dung fires, and thereÕs nothing romantic about
starvation. But itÕs real, a way of being, and there is some dignity in it, and
itÕs honorable enough. (One day I hope to settle down and build community.)
Like my freedom, my possession-less-ness is
increasing, and with a little faith – in Jesus if you like, or Buddha, or
Kali, or Mohammed, or the Dalai Lama -- itÕs all the same in the end -- I can
enjoy my nomadic beingness. Maybe IÕll survive it, this human rights work, this
poverty, this devastating hydra we call the United States of America, and maybe
I wonÕt. It is what it is. Feed
my body to lions or sharks but please donÕt plant me in a box like a butterfly
on a pin.
Maybe one day I will anonymously pass through
Becket and find that nobody anywhere remembers Leslie Mitchell or the Berkshire
Pink Granite Company or the white Ghost that hunted from the porch at 850 Chester Road. The old house will be
gone -- bulldozed and dumpstered and replaced by some tinfoil mansion with
paved yard and plastic butterfly feeders – and LeslieÕs ghost will by
then have settled in wherever souls go in the afterlife. Unlike certain
big-mouthed American zealots who claim to know where that is, I prefer to
wonder. And my lovely white Ghost
– maybe he doesnÕt care where that is, as long as he ends up there with
me, and there are squirrels to be had. [
Post
Script, October 16, 2005.
The
Sun Magazine rejected this story (the Sun is the only magazine I
submitted it to). Maybe itÕs too anti-American. Maybe itÕs too narcissistic.
Maybe itÕs too angry. Maybe the writing just isnÕt good enough. Maybe Sy Syfransky
didnÕt like the fact that I always vote for Nader, and will again. Maybe I just
have to find a way to say it better. Honestly, they replied that it wasnÕt
cohesive enough, and they encouraged me to work on it. One day I will
incorporate the photos, but itÕs finished (for now).
I spent June to September 2005 working in Congo,
and I have some stories to tell, and pleaseÉplease donÕt believe what you read
about Africa in National Geographic. The photos shot in Nairobi, for
example, in the September 2005 issue, were all staged. The text is full of lies, well told,
but lies none the same.
My dad sliced his fingers on the table saw one day
before he moved out: not the circumferential direction, but the long way --
into the nail and through the bone of two fingers. He wrapped a rag around it,
but he didnÕt go to the hospital. He finally moved out of the house, and into
his van, where – I think – he lives now. Just last week he went off
to another engine show.
The Mitchell Mansion was emptied out: someone came,
bought the choice antiques, and in the deal agreed to dispose of all the
(s)crap. The family held a tag sale, selling off the priceless junk that
remained. The butterfly collection was divided up and sold in pieces.
Ghost, that lovely Ghost – I will surely have
to get the photos of Ghost up here – my dad and I moved him to my momÕs
farm along with my other cat Crow. We built them a little hay house in the
barn. Ghost ran wildly and happily in the sunshine and the open fields all
yellow with dandelions, and he ran up and down the trunks of big maple trees,
and when he rocketed around a corner and into the two horses – well, heÕd
never seen ANYthing like a horse in the woods around 850 Chester Road –
it was a tremendous and terrifying close encounter. He was loving it, at my
momÕs, his first day.
Next morning he was gone. The coyotes hover around
my momÕs farm at night (Crow saw his brother Buck trapped and torn apart by a
pack of coyotes so I gues she knew better than to be out in the fields alone
after dark), and all we found in the morning was a little tuft of white fur. It
must have been a horrible end. My
dad was heartbroken. [