One With Others: [A Little Book of Her Days] Read Online Free PDF Page A

smoke behind the barn.
Always at the library. Always commingling with books she shouldn’t have. She wrote a report on Le Père Goriot, which was on the librorum prohibitorum list [in effect until 1966].
Ask her to go anywhere. Answer always no. No, I can’t, I have to listen to Bellini. No, I can’t, I have to memorize Browning.
Read from caint to caint.
Oscar Wilde perverted me, she told me as a calcified fact.
The Brontës, Austen, Galsworthy, Cellini’s Autobiography [I love it, remarked V with relish, when he is forgiven for all murders past and to come]. Cyril Cusack came to her school to lecture on Hopkins. Macbeth came one year as did an all-girl production of Julius Caesar.
I was totally smitten, she told me, with Mark Antony.
Memorized Cardinal Wolsey’s speech. And recalls being shepherded into the auditorium to watch General MacArthur on a little snowy television mounted onstage.
Wordan kept an alligator. Built a cement pool for it in back. Drain and everything.
V kept a retired fighting cock.
Helmet was her only pleasure.
That wasn’t her favorite bird though. Her favorite bird was a shrike.
Now, you might be praying
for a fence or the ability to read
and write; you might be praying
for a better shift, a 50¢ raise;
you might be praying for a truck
that starts right up, a pair of long legs
or the recovery of a loving mother;
you might be praying for the safety
of your twins riding the bus
with a cold sack lunch
You have to watch hear me
how you carry yourself
Festina lente my darlings
King called it a disease, segregation. [Sounds contagious.]
Then there’s the consolation of religion; whereas the promise cannot be broken if it applies only to the hereafter and thereafter; whereas herein things can remain in whatever order the ones with the most money and the most ammo say shall they stand.
RADIO MINISTRY: Now the nonrepentant homosexuals, they’re declaring war on the Gospel. Now the infidels are dying from the neck up. Now I didn’t write the Bible. Now your old-line churches are losing members. Now if I’m going to be saved, I have to be saved from something, the vile and the dirty and your low-downs. It’s not like joining the Rotary Club. Salvation, it’s a heaven or hell issue.
Now V, she wanted something
entirely different:
To feel and transmit/ The ethical this
that is not that
The Gospel helps some bear the pain/ helps
bury the hate
The swimming pool is also buried therein
and therefore this
Petition for relief/ Awaken to the task
Call for calm/ Waver never
Forever forward/ Backwards never
it says on the ex-Invader’s machine
The dirt up there
on the Ridge is called loess
Windblown stuff
good for growing peaches
Hemingway penned
some of A Farewell to Arms
on the Ridge when he was married
to Pauline [wife number two]
The marchers make fifteen miles a day in spite of the heat
I think my arches have fallen
says the Invader to the stringer
Oh yeah, I remember her, she celebrated all her kids’
birthdays on the same day
I met the retired welding teacher at the Colonel’s. We were the only customers. He had a big soft drink. We sat in the lipstick red booth. He was a veteran. He thought he would never come back to Big Tree, but he did:
This was his sky, his clouds rucked up over the fields. The blackbirds flashing their red shoulders. His country. He gave all the credit to God and His plan.
He was drafted and got arrested right before he went to boot camp, stops to add: That wasn’t the first thing we did though.
Before he left for Nam, there was something he had to do.
He and Toad and some other buddies, they were going to that bowling alley. They were going bowling. Toad had a truck, and come Sunday, come Sunday evening they were going.
There were four of us. And when we came over the rise to where you see the bowling alley on your left, there were more white people than I ever saw in my life.
Someone knew, someone told.
The bowling alley is long gone. Burned. I cruise over the rise in my