More rain… more sunshine. We took Dot in to have the wound on her face drained and have a new drain put in place. She immediately pulled the drain out. Sheesh. I tried to work on the drain once we got her back home but there was no way Dot was going to sit still for that. The good news is that there is no sign of cancer but the odd thing is that there is no reason for her wound to fill back up with this non smelly clear fluid. By this morning her wound looked like a second head. we’ll just have to see what happens this time. We will keep her very quiet and try to keep it draining on our own even if it makes her a bit uncomfortable.
My editor is happy with the new Cecil novel and we are moving on to the next stage of signing a contract. So that is good news. It just takes so long. It should out in the public hands by this time next year, or at least I hope so.
In other news, on August 17, at 6:00 AK time Heather Lende and I will be doing a Zoom event together to promote What Is Time To A Pig? and her new book Of Bears And Ballots. This should be good fun, in that we will essentially be interviewing each other about two sides of Alaska small town life. Like an Angel talking with the Devil. I first met Heather some 25 years ago when I was working on a vehicular homicide case in Haines and she turned up on a witness list. I will get you more information as the date comes closer.
Today a young reporter from the Sitka Sentinel came out and made a call on the Rain Phone to her deceased father. Then she spoke to me for a bit. We sat on the sunny lawn in plastic chairs and talked about talking with the dead on an old unhooked payphone.
She said she was going to write a “creative non fiction piece” about the Rain Phone and perhaps send it out to a journal or magazine and also publish it in the Sitka Sentinel. I knew her father who was a law clerk and investigator for a lawyer in town. He also played lead guitar for “The Glorious Youth Parade” in their first few raucous years. He was a very smart and well read guy.
His daughter, the reporter filled out the journal she noticed that I had called Abraham Lincoln yesterday and she asked me how that had gone. I told her that the President was not as busy as I was expecting. He said that everybody wants to talk about the war and about his decisions. I told her he sounded sad. He had a high voice and a midwestern accent. He sounded kind, but still tired. I just had one question for him and that was if he really expected that African slaves could one day be full citizens of the United States? Would they be jurors in every case, would they vote, and would they be full citizens and just as respected he expected that his sons would have been respected in society? He thought about it and he told me, “Truth be told, I never thought they would achieve that kind of parity, in my lifetime, or in my youngest sons lifetime. But surely by yours, they should have risen above the abject suffering and bondage they had been subjected to. Surely by now they should be fully American in their franchise.”
I imagined our saddest President in a great cluster… multiple battalions of soldiers and statesmen, Black and White, Southern and Northern. Smoke from cook fires burning all around them and the rattle of butt chains pulling wagons through the muddy ground. I imagined him drinking boiled coffee from a battered metal cup. He said, that in fact they were all together still in the afterlife. Unable to move on anywhere, a smokey Limbo, camped on a autumnal staging ground, similar to where the two battles of the Wilderness were fought, bones of the dead poking up from the ground, where soldiers and nurses had scoured out places for tents. The injured and maimed lay forever in their agony. All of more than one million souls, the seven hundred who had fought and died and the three hundred thousand who survived until the end, including the statesmen who signed the bitter orders and even the actor who ended the Great Emancipator’s life on Earth. All of them were there slapping bugs, and playing cards dinking whiskey and tea around fires. Waiting.
“Waiting for what?” I asked Lincoln, and he said, “I didn’t really know for the longest time, but the smartest among us now have come to believe that we are waiting for the war to end. The real issue of emancipation, the real reason we died, to be called to account, to be defined, and to be resolved and won. None of us can go to heaven or hell, I suppose until the fate of those Black Africans has been resolved.
I didn’t keep him on the phone long for he seemed so tired… and still so sad.
Some rain, some sunshine:
and under the grass lay bones
of our ancestors.
jhs
Here is a recording of me reading the opening of Don Reardon’s fine novel “The Ravens Gift.”
