Tom Foran Clark

For not quite one year in the latter days of the twentieth century, before departing the Utah Rockies to go live in the Green Mountains of Vermont, I lived in a small room in a big three-story red brick boarding house in Salt Lake City known in its neighborhood as the Mead House, named for the octogenarian landlord, robust, round Jack Mead, who only showed his face in order to curse a tenant, fix a faucet or a broken window, or set around fresh tin ash trays. His right-hand-man and live-in-manager was Jon Severs. Already, only in his mid-twenties, lanky Severs had found his calling. It was his job to scold the tenants at Jack Mead's house in Mead's stead -- to bawl them out -- to curse them for leaving dishes in the sink or for leaving beer cans in the common room. Every evening Severs would gather up all the dirty dishes, glasses, silverware, and throw these out the kitchen window. He also threw out any slippers, shoes, shirts, socks, jocks, and shorts left lying about. On rent day he went room to room to collect money. If you didn't pay at once, he screwed his face up in a look of almost crushing contempt.

Jon Severs was not well liked, but we only saw him evenings -- throwing out the dishes and the rest -- or on rent-day once a month. The tenants loved to talk about him behind his back, attributing many of the world's worst problems to him, and to people like him. Many of the tenants left their dirty laundry and dishes and so on lying about on purpose, not to irk him but "to feed his need."

When he wasn't breaking dishes or demanding rent, Severs liked to ensconce himself in his room on the third floor, and sit or lie on the wooden floor and read. He was an insatiable reader. His room was filled with colossal stacks of old and yellowed newspapers. Jon said he’d never read a newspaper that wasn't at least ten years old. He called all current journalism 'populist nonsense.' Were it not for his venturing forth to collect rent and toss other people's goods out windows, we would probably never have seen him.

One day Jon emerged from his newspaper stacks to go throw a yelping black Labrador out of the kitchen window with dishes, etc., killing the poor dog. The Labrador had belonged to boarders Jim and Bob, twin brothers who lived in the two available fourth floor attic rooms. When the heavier-set of the twins, Jim, got word of Jon's deed, he first punched Jon's teeth down his throat, then threw him out a window -- the highest upstairs bathroom window, after which Jim dropped bathroom towels covered with his own excrement on him. Severs suffered hurt pride, purple and yellow bruises, and four teeth knocked out.

The next day, Jack Mead showed up to evict Jim and Bob, him screaming bloody murder at their empty rooms. Jim and Bob had already departed, leaving no messages behind.

Rob Wren moved into the two vacated rooms. "R n' R," as he was called, had come to Salt Lake from Wyoming. He was an African American who’d been an intern park ranger at the Grand Tetons National Park for a year. He’d lately taken work as a snow pusher driving a snowplow at the Stardust Ski Resort high in the mountains. He kept one of the two rooms empty but for a simple cot he slept on from time to time. The other room he carpeted wall to wall and filled with plush tiger-skin covered armchairs and couches for his weekend guests, women the snow pusher regularly and mysteriously wooed to the Mead House from the Stardust Ski Resort. For all that, R n' R was rarely in his rooms at all. He spent nearly all his time in the house watching public television programs on the TV in the common room.

Directly under R n' R's guest quarters was the Turk Mehmet Tasdemir's room, small but as intimate and elaborate as a sultan's love chamber. Mehmet was as intelligent and suave a gentleman as you could like. Unfortunately, the biggest lout in the house, Seth Kirkland, an unredeemable drunkard, despised the elegant Turk. I tried to be a peacemaker, saying “people do what they are up to; and what they aren’t up to, they can’t do.” I figured everyone was doing the best they could, even drunken Seth Kirkland.

Seth was prone to passionate outbursts. When you saw him in pain, you knew he was in his element. Looking for a fight, he once accused regal Mehmet of being "a God damned son of Perdition dwelling in darkness." Mehmet, remaining calm, pressed his knuckles hard into his temples and, in silence, departed the house. Later, Mehmet came to me and confessed Kirkland was literally driving him crazy. I told him, listen, if anyone was going crazy it was Seth, not him, Mehmet.

Seth, eavesdropping, was outraged. A zoo baboon had better sense and manners. He about tore the place apart, littering the boarding house with strewn jottings, crumpled paperwads, abandoned sticky-note messages left on the stairs and in all our shared living spaces. Most of his messages were short, clear, and fiercely resentful (“Death to Unbelievers”); others were so telegraphic as to be indecipherable (“mmt tlks mch crp”, “gmn ftr fddrn cnon fddrn hvn”, “rnr cldnt hv blk prtr trnt,” and so on).

Seth was a Mormon -- "one of the other Mormons," he insisted -- the other kind. Seth believed good Mormons would become gods in the hereafter, populating their own worlds, creating their own versions of Jesus and Satan. He believed the Garden of Eden was located in the place that is today called Independence, Missouri. He believed in a three-level afterlife, where the highest world was reserved for believers, the middle world for well-meaning non believers, and the last world for "people like R n’ R -- the lowest of the low."

Seth, whose original name was Sam had, just a few years before, gone through a difficult Agape Love initiation ceremony conducted by a group of latter day Knights Templars called the Ordo Templi Anodopetalum, where he'd learned an ancient secret handshake which, if he demonstrated it to us, he said, would necessitate his having to kill us afterwards. At the initiation ceremony Sam, through certain "penalties," had been defeated and, through certain other "ritual enactments," Seth had received his new spiritual identity and name. In a circular clearing in a poplar forest, he'd been tied up and suspended by his arms from the limb of an oak tree. His captors ("benefactors") stated their intent to skin and eat him even as they sharpened their knives. They then began to "slice" him -- first his throat, from ear to ear, followed by a symbolic disemboweling that began just under his chin and continued all the way to his navel -- resulting in anxiety, paranoia, panic, convulsions, and his "liberation." Sam -- Seth -- had agreed to his own execution if he ever revealed any secrets beyond these which he'd just revealed to us.

Seth believed that, as the devil and his angels were Sons of Perdition who dwelled in darkness, it were better that some people he knew had never been born. He believed Jesus Christ had been begotten through a sexual union between an extraterrestrial male and a fertile earthling woman and that he, Seth, together with just such an archetypal woman -- reduced to only her sexual and childbearing attributes -- could create, themselves becoming Gods, their own spiritual offspring to populate their own future worlds. Seth said he was, like his God, "masculine, fiery, and solar-phallic" -- as had been Jesus Christ, who'd not only been a married man, but also a polygamist.

There was one young woman in the house among the numerous young men -- Susan Peters -- who often cooked up huge feasts for us all, running between the sturdy old porcelain and steel oven-stove in the kitchen and a tiny hot-plate in her room. Nothing could beat her rice and vegetable dishes. She could also toss a salad -- crunchy romaine lettuce and chives, watercress, and homemade yogurt-based dressings. She had as many recipes for dressings, sauces, and gravies as ways to peel an orange. She had all these fancy turns of elbow, and swift and clever hands. Houdini would have loved her. I did.

It was Susan who invited me to go with her to attend a Sundance ceremony put on by one of the southern Utah tribes -- I think it must have been the Utes or Paiutes; I didn't know one tribe from another -- an intense ceremony running four days. We went down and camped nearby, then visited the scene as special guests -- idle spectators, really. How Susan got the invitation in the first place remains a mystery. It was a sacred ceremony and, obviously, we were outsiders.

On the first day, some of the participants, young men, stood in a circle around a tree that had been placed in the middle of a ceremonial arbor and, at their leisure, slowly began to dance. After a while, emerging from the woods, a parade of jesters, or clowns, marched into the Sundance arbor, each with his or her own peculiar, zany, almost hideous outfit. These ridiculous costumes, home-made from rags and daubed randomly with paint, covered their entire bodies. Enormous crooked beak-like noses sprouted from masks under hoods concealing their heads. Each held an oak branch with a white cloth pouch filled with a tobacco offering. Bystanders, mostly women, moaned and chanted, throwing tobacco, coins, and clothes on the ground before the approaching jesters. These tricksters teased and tickled the dancers, then left again.

On the second day the young men, the dancers, in order to show their appreciation for the gift of their lives, had themselves hung in the air like so many crucified Christs. A buffalo was led into the arbor -- not a real buffalo, but one created along the lines of a Chinese dragon -- two people covered by a shaggy rug with horns. This buffalo began randomly knocking the jesters over, also thrusting his horns into dancer's legs. The jesters scolded the buffalo and tried to shoo and scare him away, but then instead began being very kind to the beast, treating it respectfully, and finally led it from the arbor quietly.

Returning, the tricksters resumed being as ugly, insulting, and obnoxious as possible -- harassing the dancers by any means they could think up. They couldn't speak in a human manner but, instead, had to "talk" with shrill, annoying whistles. The only good thing you could say about all that disruption and harassment by these jesters is that it took the dancer's minds off their actual suffering and the fact that the worst was yet to come. The end was coming.

Through the days, the dancers were deprived of food, water, and sleep. Each of the days must have been very hard on the dancers, but the fourth day surely must have been the most exhausting, for it was then the men pierced themselves with spears, offering their flesh to The Great Spirit, giving of themselves to show symbolic solidarity with women, who routinely sacrificed their bodies to men so that life could continue. One of the clowns was given a rifle, and another a bow and arrow, which the two then used ritualistically to shoot the dancers -- to make sure that they were "dead." The dancers were then cut down and removed from the Sundance area, returning to life out of view from the arbor.

On the fifth day, Susan and I broke camp and returned homeward. Along the way, we stopped in a canyon clearing for a picnic of tuna sandwiches and pink lemonade. We’d finished eating and were lying romantically on a patch of grass along a riverbank, embracing without speaking. Susan was wearing a blouse I loved, blue jeans, a gold bracelet on her right arm, and a splendid turquoise bead necklace around her neck. I'd taken her in my arms, hoping not only to get to first base but to do some deep spelunking, showing my support for life continuing.

“I have a son,” Susan said suddenly, retreating from my advances. “He was born out of wedlock. I was raped. I’ve decided to leave Salt Lake.” She withdrew from my embrace. When I opened my eyes, she was already walking away. “I’m going to go be with my baby.”

Wringing my hands, I followed her to the car. “What’s the baby’s name?” I asked.

“Fulp,” I vaguely heard her answer. I know now she’d said “Phillip” but, at the time, stunned by her news, I wasn’t really listening.

Back at the boarding house, Susan stuffed most everything she owned into paper grocery bags and put these on the curb out front of the house. The only things remaining in her room, her hot plate and her books, she left to me. I was so distracted, perplexed, and muddled, I didn’t even say thank you, nor did I offer to go with her to the airport. “We’ll stay in touch,” she said, and got in the waiting taxi.

That evening, I cooked my dinner on her hot plate -- stir-fried mushrooms, onions, carrots, green peppers, and plenty of soybean sprouts. I spent a good part of the night pacing the floor of her room. Shortly after midnight, I moved all her books to the bookshelf in my room.

When I finally got to sleep, I dreamed I was one of those Sundance clowns she and I had shared seeing. Embracing Susan, I put a spear into my heart. My soul climbed into Susan’s body through her womb and departed through her flaxen-haired head as a cloud. I awoke and went down to pace some in the kitchen, then went over and paced some in the common room -- back and forth, back and forth -- worrying, wondering what, if anything, I should have done or still could do.

After a while, I fell asleep on the couch. The sound of light footsteps woke me -- prowler’s footsteps, stealthy and careful. I imagined the invader carried a glistening knife blade, of course. I was ready to leap up and run, if need be. Fantastic, what goes through your head. Mehmet flung open the front room curtains. It was morning. “Rise and shine!” he said.

I let off steam that day, chopping firewood out back of the house -- chopping, chopping, and chopping -- expelling excess energy, keeping back tears.

That night I started reading a book about the Jewish Cabbala that was among Susan’s left behind books – also European Pessimism in the Nineteenth Century, Puritan Infatuation with Orientalism, Swedenborg’s Theories of Conjugal Love, and Transcendentalism Being Equal to Moonshine. Then I closed the books and went out. I went down the street to Charlie Worth’s pub to listen to live Blues and perchance drink myself to death.

Of course there was more to Charlie than his bartending at his pub. You could never have guessed, just to look at him, what all was going on in that tidy gentleman’s head and heart. He was forty or so, with long, coarse black hair streaked with silver. His face was all bones, gaunt, his leatherlike cheeks sucked in. His nose was huge, pushed flat to one side, broken in a fist fight in his childhood. His eyes were two hard, obsidian beads. He usually wore a brown buckskin coat fringed with two manes of matching two-inch strings along the arms.

He was a master bartender. Nine out of ten times he could tell a customer what he or she wanted just by looking at him or her. And he had that great bartender’s gift for listening. I sometimes kept him up past closing, telling him my woes. That night, me being the last customer, I helped him clear the tables, turn the chairs over onto the tables, and mop the floor. I kept Charlie awake right on into the wee hours. He only interrupted me once. “I want to tell you something,” he said. He put on his buckskin coat and led me out the back door to his waiting shiny dark green Porsche.

It was not yet dawn. We rolled north out of Salt Lake City along the Jordan River into deepening canyons. We hit a jutted, torn-up stretch of road winding high into the hills. We set out on foot from there, sauntering up the many long and winding lumber roads reaching like arteries all through those mountains. The sun was just emerging out over the peaks and treetops, burning off the early morning shrouds of dew. There was sureness and light buoyancy in his stepping rock to rock, like he had little brains or sensors in his feet. His tiny bead-eyes were alert and penetrating, prowling the sky and bushes and trees, even as he began to take his turn now, talking to me.

Charlie surprised me, admitting he was of Native American descent. Once it was out there, of course, it occurred to me I wasn’t shocked at all -- actually, in the obscure depths of me, I’d known this all along. Now Charlie told his story -- how he’d been born in Shipolovi, Arizona in the neighborhood of Tuba City, Oraibi, and Shongopovi, and how he was a Hopi Indian, the Hopis being “the direct descendants of the Anasazi,” the cliff-dwellers -- the legendary people who’d lived in caves high up on the steep walls of canyons.

“We Hopis speak of the distant past as if it were this morning,” Worth said, gesturing out over the fields up to the treetops, then out to the skies. “Fresh -- now. To a Hopi, everything is interwoven, interconnected, and important. What was, is. This, here and now, that -- everything -- it is all related -- which a Hopi never forgets.”

I asked Worth why he did not have a regular Indian name like He Who Speaks Slow, Survivor of Lightning Bolt, or Man Who Spears Salmon -- something like that.

“I didn’t choose my name any more than you did,” he said. “Unlike you, I was named twice. My original name was Leaping Deer. My step-parents, the Worths, gave me the name Charlie. I was born on a Reservation and raised on prairie rodents and rattlesnakes. I slept at night on a sheepskin on a dirt floor in a mud hut, and ran around free and naked and content all day until I was six years old. I was raised on the Hopi Indian ways -- up early every morning, just like this morning -- and kept to these ancient, simple ways. Every day was a holy day.”

Every now and then Worth paused to roll a cigarette from a blue pouch of Dutch tobacco, keeping still and silent when he did. He never spoke while smoking. When done smoking, he’d painstakingly bury each cigarette butt in the earth-- a tiny ritual. Then he’d resume speaking.

We continued up assorted lumber trails. Worth told me how the white man had sneaked in on his sacred childhood. “After the Spanish barged in on horses, wearing armor and looking for gold, it was the greedy cowboys who encroached, and Franciscans, and finally the Mormons. These last were the best intentioned -- busybodies all. They were the most bent on abolishing every last shred of Hopi pride and resolve to maintain the ancient ways. The Mormons came to the Reservations with their sacks full of chocolate candies, ballpoint pens, Korean wristwatches, and Italian jogging shoes -- in short, bribes. They caught up with me just before my seventh birthday. They bribed my mother with alarm clocks, dental floss, and Argentine Spam. They nabbed me and packed me off to a Bureau of Indian Affairs school. After an unhappy year there, I was placed in a ‘good Mormon home,’ in Salt Lake City. It was then I got my name Charlie -- Charlie Worth.

"They were good people, my new family,” Charlie admitted. “I mean, they meant well. They showered me with toys and things. They even dressed me up in cowboy clothes! I was caught between worlds. I was too weak to protest. I got sick -- very sick. The white man’s poison made me vomit; his ideas made me weep. Over time, I adapted. I got well again. One day I was so fit and lively, I called my stepfather an ‘egghead Nephite Moha,’ and threw a copy of The Book of Mormon at his head. He threatened me with eternal hellfire and damnation, put shame upon my head -- which, if it were up to him, I would still bear upon my head today -- and bust my nose open with his fist.”

“What does ‘Moha’ mean?” I asked.

“It’s a Sanskrit word, and also an Athapaskan Pueblo Indian word. It means ‘all the opposites at work in the infinite world.’ That’s how the real world works. But you know from your school textbooks the awful jumble that’s fed us. Leif Erickson came to America -- or maybe it was Christopher Columbus who came to America . Either way, lo and behold, there were the Indians, already arrived. We’d been here so long already, we were considered aboriginal, indigenous -- which was disproved later. Compounding errors, we were dubbed ‘Indians’! We were victims not only of dispossession, massacre, near annihilation -- genocide -- we had to live with that misnomer. Anyway -- where did the misnamed ‘Indians’ come from in the first place, can you guess?”

“Terra Mater” I said knowingly, being a little familiar with native American myths. “From the Four Wombs of the Earth. They climbed out of a hole in the ground.”

“With ears like bats, webbed feet like geese, tails like iguanas, and backbones like melted cheese?”

“They emerged from the earth full-grown and upright,” I said with conviction.

“Nope,” Worth corrected me. “They came out looking more like flapjacks and noodles than Adam and Eve. And the gods that made these flimsy creatures? -- where’d they come from?”

“Gods just are,” I said.

‘Askwali’,” Charlie told me cheerfully.

“Who is Wally?” I asked, triggering a little needed levity.

“No, no, Askwali means Thank you. I liked what you said -- ‘The gods just are.’ There’s not an answer that is better, I believe. Askwali -- Thank you -- for that. All right, okay. So people came on the scene and got backbones and otherwise evolved. So -- where’d the Indians come from?”

“Asia,” I knew.

“Yep. From the north -- from Russia somewhere. The earliest inhabitants crossed to Alaska by way of the Bering Straits some twenty thousand years ago. Then they pushed south from Alaska through the valleys between mountain ranges into Canada, then filtered down to North America. So say Anthropologists. Do you know what the Mormons say?”

I had no idea.

“The Book of Mormon says the original Americans sailed on over from across the South Pacific,” Worth said. “They say a Jewish boy named Lehi fled from Israel at the time of the Babylonian invasion around six hundred B.C., at which time Jerusalem was devastated. This was at the same historical time that right here, in the southwest, the Anasazi nomads took up their gentleman-farmer cliff-dwelling lifestyle. Over there, Lehi set out with his some of his family and their friends across the waters. The Book of Mormon says they landed in South America, down around Peru. The little band of Hebrews flourished, eventually building up a splendid civilization with marvelous cities greater than those of even the Aztecs and Mayans -- so say the Mormons,” Charlie said.

Charlie again rolled and smoked another cigarette, followed by his tiny burial ceremony.

“Lehi had two sons,” he then continued. “One was called Nephi and the other Laman. Nephi was devout and pure; Laman was a scoundrel. The two brothers had to go their separate ways, of course -- or you could not have got the end result: the family split into two nations, the Nephites and the Lamanites. Naturally, the Nephites were white, bright, God-fearing people; and the Lamanites were indolent and quarrelsome, squandering their lives away.

“Then it was that Jesus Christ came to preach to these lost tribes of Israel in America, the Nephites. Nephi’s people were plenty glad to see him! Following his teachings, they lived in peace and prosperity for many generations but, over time, degenerated. One day they picked a fight with the lazy, Godforsaken Lamanites. Soon enough, a battle was raging. They warred, then made treaties, broke these, made up new ones, and the rest -- by turns massacring one another and then apologizing, down through long centuries. Finally, God stepped in and set apart the Lamanites with an unmistakable sign: he made them brown, as befitted their corrupt pagan nature and their loss of belief, you see. God, now finding the Nephites ‘white and delightsome’ -- despite all the harm they’d done and blood they’d let -- left them palefaces.”

“Moha,” I said. “All the opposites at work in the infinite world.”

“Right,” Charlie affirmed. “Askwali. “The dark Lamanites, outraged at having been turned dark brown, turned on their paleface brethren. The Nephites were destroyed to a man. That man was named Moroni. It was Moroni’s mission, as the last prophet of God’s Chosen people, to record the story of his race. He inscribed the story in a kind of shorthand version of a language loosely resembling Egyptian on sacred golden plates. These he buried with special equipment future translators would absolutely need to have in order to decipher them. One thousand four hundred years later, a young man named Joseph Smith unearthed these plates and translated them, ‘restoring the True Religion,’ as the Mormons tell it -- giving the world The Book of Mormon. Smith at once took on the task of starting the final movement reaching toward the ultimate realization of ‘A New Zion of Saints’ in these our ‘Latter Days’.”

”The Latter Day Saints,” I said. “So what became of the Lamanites?”

“The Mormons say that in the first several centuries after destroying the Nephites to a man -- Moroni -- the Lamanites simply forgot who they were. They took up strange, pantheistic religions, ate rattlesnakes, lived in wamkishes and mud huts, dwelled in holes in canyon cliffs, and worshipped the earth and sun and moon and stars. In short, the loathsome Lamanites were transformed over time into loathsome Indians.

“At the time the railroads emerged, we Hopi Indians were corraled into a Reservation -- which was later taken back from us, our two-and-a-half million acres of land swallowed up into encircling Navajo lands. Mark my words, we Hopis never forget. While Mormons believe a man from another world ambitiously became a God in order to make this world, and to make lords and devils and all the attendant familiar drama of the unhappy world, we Hopis believe we were simply created by the Great Spirit within our loving Mother Earth. I don’t commonly go on like this,” he apologized, “but I can’t shake the feeling that I am somehow supposed to tell you this. It’s not only rare that a bartender should get such an opportunity to speak of himself like this -- it is doing me good -- but I feel strangely called to it.”

“Please go on,” I said politely.

“Askwali -- Thank you.,” Charlie said. “It is most important that you listen closely to what I have to tell you now. You’ve heard tales of how I wandered in the mountains and the deserts of this state for many years before ever opening the pub?”

“I’ve also heard you went to school in Provo, and got a PhD in Anthropolgy.”

“That’s true. After, I went to Moab, looking to settle there. I homesteaded on some open, barren land out there and was granted ownership of the ground under the hut I’d built. It was made from scrap, stuff just lying around, abandoned and rusting -- things like bedsprings, jeep parts, beer cans, bottles, bottlecaps, bones. The leader of the early Mormon settlers, Brigham Young, had said, ‘There is no private ownership of streams and water; and wood and timber shall be regarded as common property.” My cabin was built from common garbage. It did took some time to build it, but I also had plenty of that. One month after my little place was finished, I applied for and obtained from the U.S. government, for half a dollar, the tiny square of earth I’d built it on.

“Okay, now listen to this. A year after that, I sold my place to a Salt Lake City entrepreneur and financier for ten thousand dollars. Then he turned around and sold it to a California billionaire who moved it to his Beverly Hills backyard, proudly displaying it next to his swimming pool. Then an article with plenty of full-color photographs appeared in a home decorating magazine, highlighting my claptrap bones-and-bottlecaps creation. Soon, it was well-known throughout the west -- and so was I. That’s how I came to be a celebrity in Los Angeles,” Worth said regretfully. "They may as well have put me on a leash, trotting me around as they did, ‘making the circuits.’

"Six months of that and I was ripe to return to Utah. I went back to Moab to wander amid the chalk-red mesa plains in and around Arches National Park. I had a look around. I went down to the Dead Horse Point Lookout, offering a view out over the vast, splendid canyon lands of southern Utah. The green Colorado river loops like a lasso tight around the base of the flat topped mesa plateau, forming a natural corral at the top -- a bottlenecked peninsula. In the old days, cowboys forced wild horses to the high mesa peninsula and barricaded the neck. Every now and then the cowboys returned to add new horses and collect the enduring horses they’d previously left behind. The dead horses were generally pushed off the mesa to the valley floor far, far below. The new additions were left to endure -- or to die. Thus the moniker, Dead Horse Point.

“So there I was one day, at that point, marveling at the brilliant cruelty of the cowboys, feeling sorry for the stranded horses, and I began to cry. I laughed and wept, laughed and wept. In my convulsions, I just about rolled right off that mesa. I pulled myself together and resolved I’d return to Salt lake City to be a bartender. The world is so immensely sad and funny -- do you see it? I decided to tend bar, be on hand, keep people’s glasses filled, be a good listener. People have such joy and hardship.

“Did you know that in their first winter here, when the Mormons first landed in the Great Salt Lake Valley, they ate thistletops and weedroots to keep themselves alive? In the spring, they cleared the land, set up irrigation, and their crops flourished. Then a plague of crickets arrived in myriads, gobbling up the grain. The despairing Mormons got down on their knees and prayed. Then they got up and tried some things to end the suffering. They tried to burn the bugs, and drown them, and even beat them back with shovels and broomsticks. But the crickets kept coming.

“One day seagulls winged in elegantly over the western part of the lake, heading for the farm fields, hungry for crickets. Obviously, God had intervened. In like fashion the Mormons, hungry for Indians, say Indian genocide -- the extermination of Native Americans -- is also, obviously, God intervening. But I know, and you know, God is already present in everything -- God doesn’t intervene. God serves the drinks, keeps our glasses filled, and everybody laughs and weeps. Well, Askwali -- Thank you,” Charlie finished. “It’s not every day a bartender gets to have somebody be so good a listener. I appreciate you.”

That night Worth served me a lot more beer than he should have, and in the morning I had a terrible hangover. I overslept and had to hurry to be at my new job on time. I’d accepted work with a successful contractor, Henri DesRosiers, an emigré of Le Puy, France. A strong, compact fellow, DesRosiers was just finishing up work on a house he’d built himself. He’d bought an acre of land three houses up from the Mead House, acquiring the parcel from his wife’s brother-in-law. DesRosiers, fifty, liked to wear a denim jacket, a blue oxford work shirt, denim jeans, and fancy-tooled pointed cowboy boots. He didn’t pay me near what I was worth, but I could see how badly he needed help. “Sacrément!” he'd cry, hitting his own thumb with his hammer. “C’est n’est pas possible!”

When I got back to the boarding house after my first day working for DesRosiers, Mehmet and R n' R were performing a strange ritual. On their knees in the common room, the black man and the Turk were banging their heads on the wooden floor. Seth ran up smiling, smelling of whiskey and ale, and led me into the hall. He pressed a letter postmarked Grange, Vermont to my chest. “It’s her,” he said, pleading that I open the letter and read it aloud.

“My dear,” Susan had written,” Your last eight postcards arrived here all at once -- with sixteen cents due. The postman threatened he would not leave our porch until I paid. I only had a quarter and a nickel and a dime. He finally took the dime and nickel, adding in a penny from his own pocket, saying he preferred this to making change for the quarter. I’m enclosing that quarter with this letter, which I send as a token of my friendship for you.”

A quarter was taped to the letter.

“Rest assured,” she continued, “this is not my last quarter. I send it to you for good luck. I’m getting by, working at my uncle Fred’s hardware store five days a week, seven hours a day. Phillip's fine, and I am fine. Love, Susan.”

Seth begged to have the stamp. I tore off the corner of the envelope, gave it to him, and went up to my room. On the floor was Susan's hot plate and my toppled bookcase. My books and her books had all been removed. Jon Severs appeared in the open doorway holding unwashed socks and broken dishes in his arms. Had I forgotten this was rent day? The eruption of my laughter made his hair stand up. The floodgate holding back my tears was lifted.