Remembering
By Susan Dale
David walked with his shadows stretched across the earth: hollow within, soul yearning, heart heavy. Yesterdays, his only companions. With padded steps, he moved onwards: silent, quick.
Of-a-sudden, he heard unfamiliar sounds coming his way. Grass rustling, canteens rattling. He slowed his pace to standstill. Quickly, he ducked behind a stand of tall undergrowth. He focused to hear voices vague and slurred words. Peering through blades of tall grasses, he saw the meager remains of what remained of an NVA platoon (north Vietnam army). Unsteady on their feet, they weaved from left to right. Their words came slow and far between long pauses.
A band of ragged soldiers stood directly in front of him when he was hidden in the grasses. While weaving, their heads circled in confusion. He saw the thousand-yard stare in their eyes and hesitance in their movements. Because they were passing around a red-hot butt and pulling in its fumes, he concluded that they were drugged. And to add credence to his conclusion, the biting smell of weed hung heavy in the humid air. The soldiers’ battle-weary regrets and bone-empty stomachs were soothed by pot’s drugged comfort. They appeared helpless in their stoned state. Consequently, David did not fear them. He walked out boldly from behind the grasses: a tall, thin man, wild as the world of his journey. Long past soldiering, he was miles beyond maps … far from directions, enemies, and/or allies. And while he was traveling his long journey, he was being metamorphosed. Following stars, he traveled in intuitions. Stepping over dreams, he entered other
dimensions. His was an uncharted odyssey. He arrived here in this place and at this moment by instincts: a lost creature existing somewhere between human reasoning and creature survival.
To the NVA, he seemed but a part of their pot dreams: here without provocation in an inexplicable instant. And in the next moment, he was smoking weed with them. Throughout a long afternoon, he slipped in and out of reality. The pot plumes rose to the clouds. The clouds drifted off as did the tokers, to become wisps in the skies.
Pot took David around the bend of the moment: back to the purgatory of remembering. Upon him, an outpouring of time past: yesterdays vivid and immediate. Sliced to the exact moments, these hot fervors of life: the depictions of other times, other places. They were here without provocation, without will: the pulsing flow of yesteryears. Life in all of its contrasting colors. He was bonding in a mystical communion of the past.
He pulled them up one by one, the secrets he thought he long-ago buried: never to be looked at again. Back before White Horse, his Cherokee father, he traveled. Back beyond the Cherokee reservation. Back to Melissa, his mother; blonde, blue-eyed, proper from toes to teeth, and oozing with southern charm. He was her spoiled darling. His every gesture and motion remarked upon with proud affection by not only Melissa, but by her many friends and extended family.
Back he went to his grandfather’s plantation house on the Cooper, decaying in a genteel way of moss and faded bricks, of patina and old south: back behind rows of old oaks. He was sliding, stocking feet, across the oak planks of the plantation home. His mother said he was polishing them. He was racing up and down the winding stairway.
Back he drifted to his mahogany pony: clip-clop shiny, gleaming as he pranced down the worn path behind Melissa’s gardens of bright-colored poppies waving on long stems. Upon him next, his aunt’s atelier in the old house on the Battery, the walls covered with her dreamy pastels.
Further along now, to the sometimes visits of his father: a Cherokee spokesman on his way to Washington to conduct meetings for tribal land and Indian welfare. On one such trip he met Melissa, and they fell in love to marry, much to the disapproval of her family. Afterwards, the tall Cherokee drifted in and out of his son’s life.
But as he was floating in and out of time, David was seeing the past, as would a witness and not a participant: viewing his yesterdays with a serenity of spirit. Back and forth his memories went: memories traveling in drifts of pot smoke. Back to the old plantation home on the Cooper, then to his father’s reservation. To the dark-haired Cherokee girls in abandoned cars. To his step-mother‘s trailer in Ohio. To Rita in her white convertible. Her hair over her shoulders, down her back. To Lea in the sunset cottage: her eyes so blue as forever. To the twisted paths of the twisted mazes of Forces’ missions in Saigon.
Time was coming upon him without hours or places. Weed transported the Cherokee son to the train crash that killed his mother and grandfather: a tragedy that was eased by his drugged recalls. The yesterdays floating by him were out of reach. He was too drugged to stop them, too drugged to feel emotion. Floating by him too the funeral of his mother and grandfather. Afterwards, his aunt pleaded with his father for the upbringing of her beloved nephew. He remembered hearing them behind closed French doors. He heard too the silence of White Horse. His Cherokee father didn’t move to words; he moved to the drumbeats of lesser gods: gods that told White Horse that David was the son of he and Melissa, and no one else’s. Quietly leaving and taking his son with him: not explaining, not arguing, not speaking: just moving onwards: by train, by bus, by footsteps to the reservation in North Carolina. It sat high on a mountain ringing with wild winds: this reservation of windowless shacks and Cherokee chants. Wild winds were calling him home.
And time recalled was not crushing him, as it had in the past. Time drifted by him like prophesy being fulfilled: prophesy laid out before him on an altar of what has been and, therefore, has to be accepted.
His thoughts traveled back to the road. Continually on the road, he and White Horse, laying up steel beams for construction. Across the states: one worksite after another until they reached Ohio. Ohio, where White Horse and his son moved into a trailer with Karen and her son. Then White Horse moved into Karen’s bedroom where the twins, David’s half brothers, were conceived.
Back to the road, but this time on a fatal trip to lay up an auction house in Toledo, Ohio. Toledo, where in a seedy bar, White Horse was stabbed to death by an irate husband who caught White Horse with his Caucasian wife.
And when he, David, White Horse’s son, became indignant over his father‘s dangerous womanizing, he was struck with the truth of his own connection with Rita: a mirror image of his father’s connections to
his mother, to Karen, and to the woman in the bar.
He went on to remember he and Rita; together, even after they had supposedly broken the bond of their tumultuous affair. She was, by then, Josh’s steady. And he, David, was in love with Josh’s sister, Lea.
But that was only the surface of the way things were. The underlying truths came to light when Rita turned up pregnant with David’s baby. Rita’s condition was also David’s, but Josh took it upon himself to include his own wrath into what was already a murky mix. All together, wraths and shames, regrets and rages, led to the bloody battle between he and Josh: a battle so ferocious that it sent David packing and on the road out of town in escape. Escape: that was what his life was about. Over and again, escape.
Through drugged eyes, he was observing the whole of those life-changing days. His first life started off in an old manor house crumbling by the Cooper River. That life crashed with a train wreck that took him to an Indian village in the Carolina mountains. Down the mountain to another life on the roads across the states: the roads that he and his father continually traveled. The life that began in the trailer in Norwalk, ended with his father’s stabbing. Then came the life in Norwalk without his father: alone with his stepmother, Karen, and his half-brothers.
Floating into his drug-induced dreams, Rita and her golden sensuality. Drifting in next, willowy Lea with husky voice and Simian features. Then Vietnam, Forces, and sticky Saigon thick with heat and humidity:
thicker yet with plots and counterplots. He, twisting like the Mekong, through so many of them. The final battle of scout patrol: the dead and the dying. He was the only one who escaped with his life: the life that took him on his present quest.
And all of it coming and going in a sad, but gentle way, as if the rugged boulders of his past were melting into time. In his drugged state, yesterdays were not stabbing him, as they did when he was stone sober. Instead, he felt himself weaving back and forth between today and tomorrow while trying to try and find his footing in the now.
The now: a jungle night ringing with screeches, mating calls, and cries of the captured. Within the void of a dark cave, he took refuge. His head spinning: he was stomach-sick. He moved to the back of the cave, as far back as he could get: his back rubbing against the cave wall. This was the stone habitat known as the cave of lost souls. And all that slept in the cave tonight were lost: lost in drugged states, lost in battle regrets. They lost their youth and their faith, and all were wearing the thousand yard stare in their eyes.
With eyes heavy, David crashed into a wall of nothingness.
Tossing and turning in the front of the cave, the NVA too were wandering through drugged stupors. They shouted out their nightmares of hunger and battles, only to have them echo back and forth between the cave’s flagstone walls.
On one of the walls leaned a carved notched ladder. On the ladder David climbed out of the cave, up into the night skies. Climbed then to the rings of Jupiter that took him around to yesterday. When he rounded the ring, and came back to tomorrow, he realized that time in the skies was time on earth. Around and onwards, to around and back. He stepped back on the ladder to descend down the rungs that took him into the cave of lost souls.
But before morning filled the cave with sun-lit clarity, bright enough for the hung-over NVA to pinpoint the alien who lie in back of the cave, David stepped over their prostrate bodies to leave before they awoke.
And after he walked out of the cave, he bent to lay a stone at its entrance. He left his stone as a mark of his being: a token of his presence in the here and now.
Then he stepped into a mountain fog that hung thick and deep. Step by slow step, he pieced his way through the brume of a misty dawn. Winds were picking up speed to part the fog and show him the way of his quest: this time in the direction of a new-born sun.
- - -
Susan’s poems and fiction are on Eastown Fiction, Tryst 3, Word Salad, Pens On Fire, Ken *Again, Hackwriters, and Penwood Review. In 2007, she won the grand prize for poetry from Oneswan.e
By Susan Dale
David walked with his shadows stretched across the earth: hollow within, soul yearning, heart heavy. Yesterdays, his only companions. With padded steps, he moved onwards: silent, quick.
Of-a-sudden, he heard unfamiliar sounds coming his way. Grass rustling, canteens rattling. He slowed his pace to standstill. Quickly, he ducked behind a stand of tall undergrowth. He focused to hear voices vague and slurred words. Peering through blades of tall grasses, he saw the meager remains of what remained of an NVA platoon (north Vietnam army). Unsteady on their feet, they weaved from left to right. Their words came slow and far between long pauses.
A band of ragged soldiers stood directly in front of him when he was hidden in the grasses. While weaving, their heads circled in confusion. He saw the thousand-yard stare in their eyes and hesitance in their movements. Because they were passing around a red-hot butt and pulling in its fumes, he concluded that they were drugged. And to add credence to his conclusion, the biting smell of weed hung heavy in the humid air. The soldiers’ battle-weary regrets and bone-empty stomachs were soothed by pot’s drugged comfort. They appeared helpless in their stoned state. Consequently, David did not fear them. He walked out boldly from behind the grasses: a tall, thin man, wild as the world of his journey. Long past soldiering, he was miles beyond maps … far from directions, enemies, and/or allies. And while he was traveling his long journey, he was being metamorphosed. Following stars, he traveled in intuitions. Stepping over dreams, he entered other
dimensions. His was an uncharted odyssey. He arrived here in this place and at this moment by instincts: a lost creature existing somewhere between human reasoning and creature survival.
To the NVA, he seemed but a part of their pot dreams: here without provocation in an inexplicable instant. And in the next moment, he was smoking weed with them. Throughout a long afternoon, he slipped in and out of reality. The pot plumes rose to the clouds. The clouds drifted off as did the tokers, to become wisps in the skies.
Pot took David around the bend of the moment: back to the purgatory of remembering. Upon him, an outpouring of time past: yesterdays vivid and immediate. Sliced to the exact moments, these hot fervors of life: the depictions of other times, other places. They were here without provocation, without will: the pulsing flow of yesteryears. Life in all of its contrasting colors. He was bonding in a mystical communion of the past.
He pulled them up one by one, the secrets he thought he long-ago buried: never to be looked at again. Back before White Horse, his Cherokee father, he traveled. Back beyond the Cherokee reservation. Back to Melissa, his mother; blonde, blue-eyed, proper from toes to teeth, and oozing with southern charm. He was her spoiled darling. His every gesture and motion remarked upon with proud affection by not only Melissa, but by her many friends and extended family.
Back he went to his grandfather’s plantation house on the Cooper, decaying in a genteel way of moss and faded bricks, of patina and old south: back behind rows of old oaks. He was sliding, stocking feet, across the oak planks of the plantation home. His mother said he was polishing them. He was racing up and down the winding stairway.
Back he drifted to his mahogany pony: clip-clop shiny, gleaming as he pranced down the worn path behind Melissa’s gardens of bright-colored poppies waving on long stems. Upon him next, his aunt’s atelier in the old house on the Battery, the walls covered with her dreamy pastels.
Further along now, to the sometimes visits of his father: a Cherokee spokesman on his way to Washington to conduct meetings for tribal land and Indian welfare. On one such trip he met Melissa, and they fell in love to marry, much to the disapproval of her family. Afterwards, the tall Cherokee drifted in and out of his son’s life.
But as he was floating in and out of time, David was seeing the past, as would a witness and not a participant: viewing his yesterdays with a serenity of spirit. Back and forth his memories went: memories traveling in drifts of pot smoke. Back to the old plantation home on the Cooper, then to his father’s reservation. To the dark-haired Cherokee girls in abandoned cars. To his step-mother‘s trailer in Ohio. To Rita in her white convertible. Her hair over her shoulders, down her back. To Lea in the sunset cottage: her eyes so blue as forever. To the twisted paths of the twisted mazes of Forces’ missions in Saigon.
Time was coming upon him without hours or places. Weed transported the Cherokee son to the train crash that killed his mother and grandfather: a tragedy that was eased by his drugged recalls. The yesterdays floating by him were out of reach. He was too drugged to stop them, too drugged to feel emotion. Floating by him too the funeral of his mother and grandfather. Afterwards, his aunt pleaded with his father for the upbringing of her beloved nephew. He remembered hearing them behind closed French doors. He heard too the silence of White Horse. His Cherokee father didn’t move to words; he moved to the drumbeats of lesser gods: gods that told White Horse that David was the son of he and Melissa, and no one else’s. Quietly leaving and taking his son with him: not explaining, not arguing, not speaking: just moving onwards: by train, by bus, by footsteps to the reservation in North Carolina. It sat high on a mountain ringing with wild winds: this reservation of windowless shacks and Cherokee chants. Wild winds were calling him home.
And time recalled was not crushing him, as it had in the past. Time drifted by him like prophesy being fulfilled: prophesy laid out before him on an altar of what has been and, therefore, has to be accepted.
His thoughts traveled back to the road. Continually on the road, he and White Horse, laying up steel beams for construction. Across the states: one worksite after another until they reached Ohio. Ohio, where White Horse and his son moved into a trailer with Karen and her son. Then White Horse moved into Karen’s bedroom where the twins, David’s half brothers, were conceived.
Back to the road, but this time on a fatal trip to lay up an auction house in Toledo, Ohio. Toledo, where in a seedy bar, White Horse was stabbed to death by an irate husband who caught White Horse with his Caucasian wife.
And when he, David, White Horse’s son, became indignant over his father‘s dangerous womanizing, he was struck with the truth of his own connection with Rita: a mirror image of his father’s connections to
his mother, to Karen, and to the woman in the bar.
He went on to remember he and Rita; together, even after they had supposedly broken the bond of their tumultuous affair. She was, by then, Josh’s steady. And he, David, was in love with Josh’s sister, Lea.
But that was only the surface of the way things were. The underlying truths came to light when Rita turned up pregnant with David’s baby. Rita’s condition was also David’s, but Josh took it upon himself to include his own wrath into what was already a murky mix. All together, wraths and shames, regrets and rages, led to the bloody battle between he and Josh: a battle so ferocious that it sent David packing and on the road out of town in escape. Escape: that was what his life was about. Over and again, escape.
Through drugged eyes, he was observing the whole of those life-changing days. His first life started off in an old manor house crumbling by the Cooper River. That life crashed with a train wreck that took him to an Indian village in the Carolina mountains. Down the mountain to another life on the roads across the states: the roads that he and his father continually traveled. The life that began in the trailer in Norwalk, ended with his father’s stabbing. Then came the life in Norwalk without his father: alone with his stepmother, Karen, and his half-brothers.
Floating into his drug-induced dreams, Rita and her golden sensuality. Drifting in next, willowy Lea with husky voice and Simian features. Then Vietnam, Forces, and sticky Saigon thick with heat and humidity:
thicker yet with plots and counterplots. He, twisting like the Mekong, through so many of them. The final battle of scout patrol: the dead and the dying. He was the only one who escaped with his life: the life that took him on his present quest.
And all of it coming and going in a sad, but gentle way, as if the rugged boulders of his past were melting into time. In his drugged state, yesterdays were not stabbing him, as they did when he was stone sober. Instead, he felt himself weaving back and forth between today and tomorrow while trying to try and find his footing in the now.
The now: a jungle night ringing with screeches, mating calls, and cries of the captured. Within the void of a dark cave, he took refuge. His head spinning: he was stomach-sick. He moved to the back of the cave, as far back as he could get: his back rubbing against the cave wall. This was the stone habitat known as the cave of lost souls. And all that slept in the cave tonight were lost: lost in drugged states, lost in battle regrets. They lost their youth and their faith, and all were wearing the thousand yard stare in their eyes.
With eyes heavy, David crashed into a wall of nothingness.
Tossing and turning in the front of the cave, the NVA too were wandering through drugged stupors. They shouted out their nightmares of hunger and battles, only to have them echo back and forth between the cave’s flagstone walls.
On one of the walls leaned a carved notched ladder. On the ladder David climbed out of the cave, up into the night skies. Climbed then to the rings of Jupiter that took him around to yesterday. When he rounded the ring, and came back to tomorrow, he realized that time in the skies was time on earth. Around and onwards, to around and back. He stepped back on the ladder to descend down the rungs that took him into the cave of lost souls.
But before morning filled the cave with sun-lit clarity, bright enough for the hung-over NVA to pinpoint the alien who lie in back of the cave, David stepped over their prostrate bodies to leave before they awoke.
And after he walked out of the cave, he bent to lay a stone at its entrance. He left his stone as a mark of his being: a token of his presence in the here and now.
Then he stepped into a mountain fog that hung thick and deep. Step by slow step, he pieced his way through the brume of a misty dawn. Winds were picking up speed to part the fog and show him the way of his quest: this time in the direction of a new-born sun.
- - -
Susan’s poems and fiction are on Eastown Fiction, Tryst 3, Word Salad, Pens On Fire, Ken *Again, Hackwriters, and Penwood Review. In 2007, she won the grand prize for poetry from Oneswan.e
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