Washboard's Stage

Washboard's Stage

       by Doogleglasses Puggy

              early in the morning

                        just about the break of day

                        early in the morning

                        just about the break of day

                        i couldn't find my baby

                        so i knelt right down to pray

Washboard Hank plays a kitchen sink as a tuba at his gigs. It is stainless steel with abs pipe and elbows for handholds and mouthpiece. The kids love him. He hits a steel plate on his hardhat, he rubs along a washboard tied to his waist, and he strums a guitar belted firmly to his chest. He toots a miniature horn, blows on a kazoo, stomps his feet in time, farts his armpit, leaps into the air, falls to the floor pretending to be dead, rings a bicycle bell attached to his head with a headband, and sings pretty, girlish melodies about two-titted cows, listened to by children but meant for adults who cover their offsprings' ears and blush and laugh.

       At the Trout Forest festival last year while Washboard was playing, I noticed a suspicious-looking young man by the second stage fifty yards from where I sat under a canopy out of the heat. Why did he seem suspicious from such a distance? Especially since I am shortsighted and given to looking for diversions when I have been forced to attend to an entertainment for more than half an hour. It was the fact that I saw him walk out of the bushes to the north of the tent and sit down, but continually checking over his shoulder the bushes from which he had emerged as if he were expecting someone. Then I saw, because he had aroused my suspicions by now, that he got up and walked towards a concession stand that sold festival hats and carved walking sticks, the last stall in the bazaar. But he was not going there to buy anything. I noticed this immediately since he handled items but then slipped around the side of the tent and was gone.

       I got up and walked to where he had stood by the hat stall. He was not behind the tent or near the woods fifty yards away. I pretended to be searching for shade and walked along the edge of the trees till I came to a narrow path leading into the foliage. I sat down, feigning boredom, and listened intently. No sounds could I detect coming from the woods. At least not at first. But, then I heard a muffled call, as if from a person bound and gagged. I decided to investigate. I took a few stealthy steps down the maw of the path and soon found myself out of sight of the crowd. The music wafted out from Washboard's stage. A bell rang, a horn tooted and a guitar strummed, but from a distance and, as it were, adding to the loneliness pressing me about my chest.

              I stood for a while, my former ennui and suspicion turned to a sense of duty. My body acts as a reliable refractor of emotions. When I have no mental sense of where things are at it lets me know of the real state of what's about me. It tells me now of power struggle between that sleeping daughter and that quiet mother in the kitchen, now of hate in the breast of that man at the mic in the political gathering, now of sentimentality gone extreme in the otherwise rational manner of a female student clearly out of the sexual mainstream, now of quiet love in the demeanor of a mother with incipient dementia, not listened to but strong in her heart's knowledge of what she has made and done, now of boredom in my interlocutor who would rather be talking to that bikinied girl by the water fountain, now of stern opinion in the quiet, grey-haired woman who has me wedged into a corner of the bus aisle, now of rapture in that distant suppliant kneeling, and now of ennui in the stage musician pounding his guitar strings but indifferent in his heart.

       I crept forward in starts and stops, sensing the smallest rustle of twig and branch, wishing to make no noise, longing to protect something. Then I heard it again, more clearly now, as if someone were struggling in bonds and calling for help!

(to be continued)

The Ungrateful Domain

The Ungrateful Domain

       by Rouglas Deimer

rover rover in the clover

when yer gonna bark

hover hover little lemman

how'd you get in the ark

give me money give me sweet things

suck the candy till its gone

rover rover in the clover

i've got nothing left to pawn

Sniffing sharply, Rover barked his concern and turned to defecate by the fence, as close to his neighbor's yard as he could wedge his back end so the smell would possibly penetrate deeper into that ungrateful domain. Rover had never forgiven Bob and Wilma Yearly for building that fence. He could now never see them anymore, the boards between them as they were, and force them to acknowledge him with look and pretended gentleness in order to impress upon his, Rover's, guardians, that they liked a dog they hated.

       Yearlåy managed a company called Ye Olde Trailmix. Every day at seven a.m. he left home for the office. Each night at six p.m. he returned. The company had recently declined in viability for one reason or another and Bob had decided to take what money he could out of it and hide it in his back yard in waterproof containers so as to make sure that his retirement was secure. So now, during the month of January then--now being one winter some years after erecting the fence that Rover increasingly disliked--Bob spent each evening laying Tupperware down under the snow in a drift close to the fence between the neighbors and himself. He dug right to the bottom of the drift and laid the containers of twenty-dollar bills on the frozen grass. By the end of January, having done this twenty-six days altogether, he had amassed a substantial sum of money there. Though he had not counted it, Bob had secreted one thousand times one hundred times twenty, for a total of two million dollars. Bob knew that the monthly finances would be completed early in February and so he would have to be finished what it was he was doing by the end of January. He himself did not fully understand what he was up to.

       On January 31, 2001, Bob and his wife ate dinner as usual. Then, when she went out to visit the Seafood Emporium on the corner of Taylor and Waverley, as she predictably did when Bob complained at supper that they never had fish anymore, and coupled the trip with a visit to her friend's house for evening tea, as he suspected she would, Bob watched out the living room window till he saw her car drive away and then quickly donned his parka and took up his snow shovel and went into the back yard to dig up his money. He did that. But Rover was outside, too, dropping a big load by the fence. She barked at him with her usual ou faire couler le sang, barked while she shat. She dug her scat under while he dug his cash up.

       Soon they were both finished and Bob could not resist one final act of revenge. He called the mutt's name in tones at once insinuating and ingratiating, accusing and inviting, and Rover responded with her paws up on the fence boards and a voice as raucous as any irate dog could wish for. Immediately, Bob gave the fence a mighty whack with the back of his shovel, the reverberations so gargantuan that they precipitated the canine onto its back. She lay there deafened and surprised, whimpering, and then lunged up with renewed joie de vive du canine, vociferating more insistently than ever before, furious, raging, aching to get at the man she disliked with such a burning dislike.

       If only she could sink her teeth into him, into this smug human who had outmanoeuvred her, had blocked her in, had forced her into her visual exile, powerless to manipulate the world of the two-legged, entirely cut off from passersby. She raged while Bob loaded the wheelbarrow. She bow wowed unrelentingly while he wheeled it away to his car. She howled in the fury of impotence while, she could hear, he loaded things into the car trunk. And she hurled her crescendoing at the sound of him backing down the driveway.

       Rover lost any chance to hurt him. Bob never returned. Rover did not know that where Bob lived others built fences for him and served him and killed dogs that barked too uncivilly if he indicated his distaste for them. On the western coast of southern Mexico one has many reasons to fence oneself in but almost never because dogs bark at one. As well, it is there unusual for the world to reek of dog shit in spring.       

Substituting Anglo-Saxon for Latin

Substituting Anglo-Saxon for Latin

       by Dirigible Doug

wopity wopity wopity wopity wopity wopity woo

billy informed miss smith that she'd just stepped in his doggie's doo

I was telling my company last Sunday over faspa about an issue at my school. When it came to my attention, I said, that certain boys in my school were being caught swearing I made it my business to preclude the use of expletives as efficiently as I possibly could. I called their parents, repeated the words the youngsters had said, made them swear to control their children's behavior, and then rewarded them with praise in the next month's Explicator, as in the following excerpt.

Parents often delay attending to child behavior problems because these are so difficult to identify and address. But we have among us some who, when confronted with the possibility of even small requirements for disciplinary action, leap to the task and before long solve the problem at hand. I wish to commend Henry and Marietta Franzen, Bill and Annie Cornelson, and Betty and Sven Klassen for their fine, skillful and helpful responses to my concerns this past week.

Clifford Pankratz, especially, caused troubles at recess with his references to private parts and intimate behaviors. His parents may well have been at fault since they live on Third Street.

       Third Street is a hotbed of swearing. Of course, people swear in other parts of town, too, but not publicly, nor volubly, nor with such indifference to taste. For instance, Paul Friesen might say to Dennis Leatherdale that he wishes the "h" business would pick up, but he would never in mixed company refer to a pig's privates in Low German. He would not make reference to the pointy part of a chicken's rear end during a dinner engagement, whereas Ben Hoeppner of Third Street would grin and speak of a chicken's "pleutz" while pretending to take a bite of and thoroughly enjoy chewing it, to the general approbation of the Mexican Mennonite men around the table and the apparent discomfort of the Mexican Mennonite women.

       Here and there in this town, this Winkler that is called a city now with its influx of so many Russian and German immigrants in the last fifteen years, people surprise me with their lapses. The other day I got invited to supper at Mrs. Sveta Clandervaaggen's house and when we had finished the meal she announced, suddenly, stretching and rubbing her tummy, that she had eaten enough to pull the short ones off a sow's ass. For someone of her age and respectability that is unforgivable, except that we were only the three of us and we laughed and she blushed and apologized but smiled to show that she now and then did allow herself an expression not acceptable in the ordinary way of things. Usually, you will hear statements such as, "Man, I've eaten enough to kill a cow," or "If I take one more bite my gut will bust!" but not such crudities as hers. We here from Seventh Street and up don't refer to body parts in their coarsest possibility.

       Oh, I've been to the Mexican Mennonite villages and I know where the tendency originates. I visited the Idzes in the Chako in 1983 on a trip organized by Delbert Plett and I discovered there this truth. I myself became quickly habituated to rough language and had to debrief for weeks after my return in order to reunite with my proper self. They live in the old Mennonite style houses attached to barns by a "gank," or walkthrough. Chickens wander underfoot on the yard, cows bellow to be fed and gotten into the barn, horses defecate along the road and driveway, and boys and girls go behind the barn to do their business instead of inside or in the outhouse. You may come around the corner of the chicken shed and see squatting there a woman whom just two minutes ago you saw hurrying from the house on some errand. Her long skirts protect her from observation, true, but you can hear the stream coming from under them just as if a calf were urinating in the stall. No toilet paper round, I wonder with what they wipe themselves. I never noticed them applying paper to their persons during that whole time I visited. Nor do they seem intent on washing after defecation or the emission of bodily fluids. That astonished me and preoccupied my thoughts for some time. I had to wrestle with myself to overcome a sense of disgust and be able once again to enjoy their fine meals, tasty and nutritious. But. to my dismay, also, I discovered that the language used by Mexican Mennonites surpasses anything I have accidentally stumbled across in street, home or even on the schoolyard at recess.

       Phrases of inappropriateness emanate with regularity from their lips in mixed company. Pete will say, "Shuve deen morsz eva, du fula futz," and Hank will smirk and stay where he is. Eva might be ironing something and turn to Betty and say, "Fruh, treijk dee doch betta oewn. Deeni taetjeus deij steikje meijst goewns ruewt and Peijta vowt seijk bepesshe soew schvind aus heij siene naes hiej nan staechjt." References to "ass" and "tit" are common as pig manure in these villages. I heard a preacher speak, in confident tones, mind you, of how his "pisser" was itching him. He got off his horse, scratched at his privates, and said, smiling at myself and his hired hand with him, "Mee jeikt di pisshat," and then he added, "Meeni fruh deij jeikjt sike dowe ook meinchjmol." I couldn't believe my ears. Plainly, our children receive their education at home, and Third Street has its taproot still nestled firmly in the bosom of home in Mexico. I really have no hope of altering their proclivities, I added to my company, helping myself to another of what had been more than my fair share of my fine wife's white buns and a heaping pat of butter and spoon of wild plum jam. But I do not despair so much, I said, as struggle to maintain a sort of dignity on the schoolyard at least.