I Would Help You, Too

 I Would Help You , Too
     By Freddy Feltguid

          Trust a blind man to tell you about light. 

A small boy tripped along on his way through the forest to his grandmother’s house. He felt lithesome, but as he continued along he began to feel uneasy. When he got there, having met no one on the walk, he breathed a sigh of relief and opened the door. The moment he did so, a hairy snout and jagged claws lunged and bit at him and bore him down. He struggled and he screamed, the pain of lacerations intense, but encumbered by the basket he carried and by its contents, he could not manage more than a quick chomp on the creature’s leg and a kick at its underside before blackness overcame him. When consciousness returned, he found himself in darkness dank and foul.
     “Hello. Is anyone there?” He called. But no voice answered. He moved a little, since he felt the tightness of his circumstances. His legs appeared stuck in a hole, his arms and hands sloped upwards towards a narrowing of a tube of sorts and his torso sagged upon some wet, rubbery netting.
     “ Gosh! Where on earth am I? he whispered to no one. He punched and screamed suddenly with what force he could muster. All muffled, all mute, little distance achieved. Little force effected! Oh what misery to be attacked and left for dead inside a watery bag! The boy began to cry. He seldom cried, but on this occasion, the thought of this unfair treatment more than his bodily discomfort brought tears to his eyes and sobs to his chest.
     “I am only 12,” he thought, “and much too young to die! I wish to travel, to see India and Sanziban, I wish to be kissed for the first time by someone I love (and here he sobbed with renewed intensity). And I need so much once in my life to live in my own room unshared by a sister or brother!” Having articulated to himself these sad sentiments, the small one let go of his self control altogether and wailed till the heavens themselves began to shush him, though he heard the angels not.
    Nearby, in the deep and heavy woods, a brave, strong axeman wielded her blade in her lonely labours. She whistled and sang, for she loved this life, solitary, quiet, productive and slaking as it was. She arrived with sharpened axe each morning and honed it back to a bright edge at night when wood had made it pay the price. Cutting into a large birch, this young labourer thought she heard the tree call out for help. She stopped the second swing of her blade just in time and stood there perplexed. She listened. Feeling sheepish, she asked the tree if it was sensate, but it answered her not. She waited, sure that she had heard something and then, to her satisfaction, the muffled  call came again.
     “Help! Help, help, help!“ she heard again and again. Feeling sure that somewhere close to her an individual languished and lay in great pain, she put down her ax and cupped her hands, calling in return.
     “Are you hurt? Do you need assistance?” She paused. The calling had stopped. Then it rose again with great intensity.
    “I am here, inside something!” the small thin voice  came to her, as if from the ground itself. She shivered. What if a wraith? What if ghosts? But she bit back her fears and did not run away.
      Again the voice resumed, answering her second question. “I am hurt, yes! My abdomen seems to have taken some injury and bleeds, I think, since all is dark as pitch in here. My shoulder on the left side hangs useless and I have a feeling that my face is badly cut! Other locations and types of my wounds I decline to name or describe! Also, I am lying in some sort of disgusting filth!”
     The woodcutter stood enchanted. The voice soothed her, though it made her fearful for its proprietor. The white birch by her side seemed as bent on hearing each word as she, and it leaned in the direction of the quiet enunciations.
     “Do you need my help?“ She called in her loudest voice. She knew the answer and leapt into action even before the other could respond. She beat the bushes about her and soon discovered, lying there in the gorse behind some shrubbery in profound sleep, smiling, at peace with himself now his stomach did not growl any  more, a wolf or huge grey proportions. 
     “I hear your approach, your footsteps resound here. You must be nearby,” the distant voice called. Then the woodcutter knew, and in an instant had severed the head from the body of the dangerous beast. She reached down its gullet, blood, filth and gore rinsing her fumbling hand. She felt a foot! She knew she had found the source. She reached further until she found some purchase and then, with her large hand firmly grasping whatever it was of him that let her hold on, she slowly extracted the boy through the slipperiness till he lay there before her, breathing heavily, overcome by sensations of light and air. 
     Thank you!” He spoke, finally, when he could breathe again. “It was a wolf I was inside, then?” he asked, staring at the severed head. Then recovering his equanimity, he added, “If ever you were eaten by such a beast, I would do the same for you. I would not hesitate to slap him and punch him and free you from his digestive grasp.” So saying, he straightened his clothing and, waving to the astounded woodcutter, jogged home to his supper.                                  

We Have an Agreement

 We have an agreement
     by Darting Douglas Deodorant 

I wish to tell you a story about wild wealth and a prospector’s discovery. Waylon Falls had been searching for gold in the regions south of Kenora for all of his mature life. At 63, he felt 43, given his six foot frame, broad shoulders, dark hair, strong arms and muscular legs. A year ago, at the Kenora Prospectors’ Days, he had carried a pile of 8 one hundred pound sacks of flour on his back the distance and earned a second prize. Two years ago, he carried an injured Dakotan over three portages down from Tegau Lake through Dryberry and Berry Lakes and canoed him into the Kenora hospital. Waylon’s grandfather once pulled a team of horses out of the marsh by the bridle in a fit of irritation, and his own father, already retired, small but very strong, once lifted, unaided, a granite boulder the size of a sluice box onto the back of a pick-up truck. So, Waylon felt strong and youthful despite his age.
     Women all the way up to eighty year olds drew to him and wanted to talk, sit, marry, walk, visit, kiss, play, whisper, work, drink, wrestle, carry, live, sleep, fight, laugh, and conspire with him. He enjoyed all these activities in their company when he’d been out of the bush for some time and in town. People inspired his inner drives. The moment he left human territory for a day, that part of him shut down, however. He had tried, many times, at his camp, for the sake of diversion, to quicken desire and imagination, to spur on his inner desires, and to experience the jarring pleasure on his own. Now and then, if the lapse of time still snailed the memory of the human form enough to keep trees, gulls, rocks, water and sun unimmediate, he achieved a reduced version of what the town’s bustle and comings and going’s of body and motion provided with certain clarity. Mostly, though, he had learned in the past decade to leave the thought of those others, those beauties, alone.
     That was why he bathed seldom. Sometimes a year went by without a voluntary dip in the water. This time, despite having been to Sioux Narrows for supplies, food, wine and tobacco, and having seen at stores and gas stations women in their clumsy grace, he had not stopped long enough to let himself begin to think of lingering. Instead, as soon as the taxi loaded his purchases, he returned to the Berry Lake landing and bore them off north in his canoe.      
     Hurried because he had discovered gold! A vein of it lay there at Marny’s Point, inland from the water 100 yards, where quartz ran unexpectedly in great, thick roads through the gray and pink granite. This part of the lake, hemmed in on all sides by tangles of tree roots and shallow reefs, remained unvisited by people from one century to the next, so quite understandably the treasure could have lain there forever exposed but untroubled by pick or ax. It was, however, not so situated, not so available. Covered in peat and moss, deeply blanketed by red pine needles, the entire kraddock of smooth rock would never have come to his attention accept for a stroke of great luck. A large pine, a white pine two feet in diameter, had its roots in the air near where he had camped one night some months ago. The moon had risen and it shone with unusual brilliance upon the wide waters of Tagau lake. A gathering of loons a hundred strong bobbed in two groups in the bay, filling it with their strangeness. They made no sound. They stayed so still, just bobbing. Not a ripple disturbed the warm world before him. Waylon lay on his sleeping bag near the fire in thoughtless quiet. 
    He drank from his wine bottle now and then, he smoked his pipe  frequently, always once more in his mind before he would turn in. Alone, floating on a timeless point of stone Waylon felt, as often he did on such pleasing evenings, the gentleness of opened eyes as the world closed its. He would relieve himself before drifting off. The evening breeze was beginning to freshen. Walking to the edge of the woods behind his tent, he followed the moon’s bright tree-shadows further inland under the sweep of red pine, with their soughing above him and their clear going underneath. 
     As often happens when quiet makes time unimportant, for a moment he could not decide which tree to lean on. He saw a great tangle of roots and soil ahead and wandered over.  Beneath it lay the dirty gravel of a recent uprooting. He stopped to start going back, then stood still to pee, holding onto one of the roots.      
     Standing there, he looked about, as we are wont to do when peeing in the woods, and bent down to look at the stones more closely that his stream had cleaned. They had sparked his interest. He must have seem the glimmer of gold among the stones without at first marking it. But then he knew. What had eluded him for forty years now wanted capture, and he had it in his mind’s hands as surely as an old Irishman has his wish ready for a leprechaun he sees beside a mushroom in the moonlight peat. 
     Yes, something glimmered and shone in among the chips of granite. He knew enough about these things to recognize it without having to see up close. Before he bent to pick up any of it he stood there like an old tree and wavered on his legs. He smiled a wide smile and mused upon his life. He knew that everything he’d ever endured in the woods was about to continue and keep him interested for the rest of it.
L
(To be continued)

More Reimers Loose

 

More Reimers Loose
     By Leigh, the Lassoo Kid

Father sold Raleigh goods around the countryside. Mother was the only parent at home 96% of the time. She raised us and towards the end of my stay in the village of Altona, let’s say the last three years, she operated a little greenhouse that grandpa built in the backyard. Heated by an oil burner, with a chair right next to it, the place invited lazy reading and in this spot, so delicious close to the stove, I loved to sit and wile away a Saturday. The smell of the warming earth, the wet growing green leaves, the sound of rubber boots on the sand path in between the three rows of plantings, brought me as close to heaven as I thought then it was possible to get. Where outside still insisted on the presence of winter, on the tyranny of cold, inside—in my chair with the peaceful little sputtering of flame in the hot stove and just behind this a plastic barrier—proclaimed the possibilities of spring and summer. While father stepped from his warm station wagon into the cold prairie air, carrying his sample case, and knocked on another windswept door in Lowe Farm, Plum Coulee, Horndean, Letellier, Dominion city, Saint Jean or Greta, I sat in my comfy hidy-hole besotted with Warren Neale and his girlfriend, Allie Lee, in The UP Trail as they set about helping to build the Union Pacific railroad through Wyoming and into the dangerous desert canyons of the Black Hills. But….! Already I have broken my own narrative rule, that I would not dwell on any one event in the years I spent with my parents but honour them in a modest way, devoting a sentence or two to each thing so as not to make to much of it. Yet, I’ve gotten caught up in the ambience of mother’s greenhouse in late Winter. New resolve: I’ll rein in the lingering horse of my unbridled enthusiasm and chuckchuck to the sleepy one of disciplined authoring and, with any luck, I’ll speed at full gallop through the 18 years of mommy-daddy-me. Maybe in a number of segments each ending with (to be continued).
      In 1950 (two years old) I got a burn the size of a nickel right  through my hand when I stepped out of the tepid tub water in our Rosenort basement to warm myself on a glowing space heater. Wet, I stuck to it, my frightened brother Jim (seven), scared by my terror, also drenched from the tub, stuck to my shoulders with two hands and mother, hearing screams and running up, only to grab Jim and get one hand stuck, too, had the presence of mind with her free hand to pull on the long electric cord running up the stairs until it came out of the socket. And we all were released and healthy, outside of a wounded hand and, well, a lingering general limiting effect on our powers of thought and observation. The pictures of that whole hour are burned into my memory!
     1960. Dad bought 50 evergreens and planted them along the south side of our one acre yard. 1957 dad bought a half acre of pastureland just at the eastern edge of our yard. Mom made that into another garden with hundreds of tomato plants and everything else you could think of. One year, after first frost, four of us threw the thousand unripened watermelons and musk melons wherever we felt like it, loving how they shattered. Of course, we had a war.
      Speaking of war, half a dozen of my teen cousins, on a visit from Steinbach, made slingshots from lilac branches and gathered lots of stones from the road gravel. When evening came, in its moonless darkness, we warred with a half dozen local neighbours, them invisible on the opposite side of a high hedge. We fired a hundred stones in the general direction of the enemy. One rock from their war party went through my hair just as I bent to pick up ammo. 
    1959, BC.  Rudy climbed high into a bing cherry tree to postpone picking raspberries. I threw green damsons at him where he sat in a fork twenty feet up. I eventually connected, just above the eye, and he teetered, lost rigidity and fell unconscious, limp as a blanket, through the branches to the ground. 
(To be continued)

Remembered Trysts

 [circa 2001]

Remembered Trysts
     by Douglas Remember-Me-Nots

Many of us humans remember our pasts with a tranquility that belies the phenomenal moment. We lie on a couch, for instance, and recall in a flash of peace and uproar that speechlessness that was the ’67 Pontiac Fury in which we and one other did not die as it plummeted over the bridge and down, near Neubergthal, into a dry creekbed twenty feet below, the shallow liquid mud with squished cattails around our nostrils, our legs pinned beneath the passenger door for two hours while we sang our pain into the night and knew our girl was dead. And, in the sleepiness of church on Sunday morning—with the preacher reminding us duly of the deadliness of pontification and the putrid flux of sexless being—there’s the deer we shot as it ran along the bottom of the ravine (on our first hunting trip). It trips through our mind once more and gambols there until the report of the .30-.30 and the dropping of the head forever. The knife from the belt, the puncturing of the throat, the glazing over of the eyes, the stiffening of the muscles that will soon be only venison, and our heart as we perform this surgery, all float about in our recollection as in a bathtub of tepidity and scum. And again, in a reverie brought on by nothing to do on Saturday afternoon but possibly the exercises we promised ourselves we’d undertake three times a week at 8:00 AM and find we have need of now to keep the stiffness from the knees, we recall Audrey in that town in North Dakota when we visited there as a 16 year old with our parents who had decided to travel south for once to see the Carlsbad Caverns. Her sister Eileen and she lured us (lured by their simply being nearby) from the park flowers, that mother and father loved and looked at and smelled hour by hour, and into the old growth where we walked and held hands, and they put theirs on our shoulders and legs in ways that made us dream later and welter. In the basement sorting screws, we remember Janet Baker-Tupper who’s upper body and lower body did not fully seem to match. They had about them a mix of colour that clashed, bland above, dark below. She graced Flin Flon, living near a lake, working in a restaurant, fighting men each and every day. Valerie Walker, the librarian from Exxton, New Mexico, met us in a bar in Brampton, Brazil, and we spoke for two hours together over millet beer and Pringles. She wore a slight dress of pale something with lace and Danish cloth above the breast. Her hair, the purple black of some birds about there, cut short and pointed at the outer extremities, remained unnoticed by us in our memories until this moment of screw-sorting. Memories fade from memory but grow in precision. Smells’ presence, especially, intensifies with the years.

Knife Ennes

 

Knife Ennes

     By Mr. Douglas

I met Reverend Henry Gerbrandt at my mother’s deathbed who had married my wife and myself. He was now 90 and tottering. He spoke in the hospital, to myself and my brothers, of a soldier who had tried to confess to him that he was a murderer and could not let it rest. Rev. Gerbrandt finally said to him, after many vain attempts at some consolation, “You know, I can think of nothing that will make a bit of difference to you. OK, you are a murderer. So am I. I murdered Christ on the cross. We are told that again and again. We all have sinned and come short of the glory of God. That may not help you, but I think that is the truth you are looking for.“ When I asked the preacher if the soldier had felt healing from these words, he smiled a little smile (the same one I had seen him smile standing before my wife and myself at the altar some 35 years earlier) and shook his head. “I don’t know,“ he said
     Which reminds me of the boy from the Enns family near Winkler who chased a local preacher down the street with a knife but didn’t catch him. The boy was from a Rosetown family infamously named the Knife Ennes. The father had been known to give chase with a knife if angry enough, and the grandfather had cut someone with a one. Their history had knives in it.       

      Preacher Wiebe happened, as bad luck would have it that day, to walk by the Wesley pool hall just as Jimmy walked out of it. Wiebe had a habit of giving out religious tracts to people on the street. He flipped one out of his jacket pocket now from force of habit. A big mistake. As he pulled out the track, and mentioned that it was one, Jimmy drew a knife from his pocket and drove at the preacher with such precipitation that the goodly man fell down. That is what saved him, he later claimed. The knife missed his vital organs and only cut his skin a little at the throat. He was up like a shot running for home, Jimmy at first in close pursuit. Jimmy was a big, heavy man, and though younger, not as quick as the preacher. Jimmy had the disadvantage also of being slightly drunk and so not at his most agile best.
      Well, the preacher suddenly saw 
before him in the sidewalk gutter a stick of good heft and weight and, in mid stride, picked it up from the ground as he passed. He turned the corner of a building and waited. When Jimmy rounded it, knife first, Wiebe  let him have it right in his loins. The boy dropped the knife and fell roaring to the ground where he rubbed and twisted holding his stomach and clutching the parts just below it. He swore and cursed mightily. 
     The preacher stood over him with his stick raised, debating whether to give him some more of the same medicine. He reasoned that, since he had been so fabulously frightened, he was justified.  But also he realized that the Lord asked his servants to forgive and to love their enemies. He debated, and in a flash of insight decided upon an action. He lay a tract upon the big boy’s back, took the stick and hammered down with it six times, thinking about the sacredness of that number, reasoning that the imprint of the words would forever be burned into him and leave their spirit there as marks of wisdom if not actualizations of it.                                                

 Aging Mothers
     By Dougie Waves Goodbye

Chorus
     F.                              C
     Just now as I’m recalling
     F.                                C
     My mother when she died
     F.                          C
     I have a sudden wish
     C.                     C.                         Em
     That she was standing by my side
     C.               G.        C
     Breathing by my side




C.                       G
Pictures of my mother come
C.                         G
To memory as I wait
C.                     G
4 o’clock just home from school
C.                                       Em
I’d see her through the gate
C                     G            C
Through the garden gate

Her back all bent and hoe in hand
She’d work a row of beets,
An old dress on of dirty white
And slippers on her feet
On her aching feet

Once when the censor came around
She mentioned all our names
But when it came to Rudy’s turn
She couldn’t do the same
Calling, “Rudi, what’s your name? “

Chorus

She’d get us up at 5 o’clock
And in the dusty Ford
Muddy hoes and sugar beets
And children praise the Lord,
Oh!  we’re lucky praise the Lord!

The whole shebang off to BC
Who knew where we would stay
A month of bread and pork and beans
We’d work to pay the way
Picking berries every day

Chorus

Father worked late every day
And through the raging snow
Mother at the window pane
Praying he’d come home
Midnight thinking he’d be gone

Chorus

“My son, my son, what have you done? “
She’d  sometimes say of mine
When she caught me smoking pipe
Or found my hidden wine, 
Her preserves into wine

When you were born she often said
Sun lay in the room
So thick and warm and plentiful
I had a blessed womb
You blessed your mother’s womb

Chorus

1000 stories I could tell 
of mother’s oddest ways
I leave her to the Lord she loved
In Beulah land she lays
I’m sure there she still prays

Chorus

                                                                  2006?

       

 
 Alphism in Males and Females
     By Leigh Bent PhD, D.Sc. 

I am delighted that the world includes in its welcome of variety that sub-species of human commonly referred to as Alpha, though members of that ubiquitous, self-satisfied classification hardly know themselves, let alone call themselves, by that name. Alphas self-identify as ordinary human beings. 
     By scientific consensus worldwide, according to painstaking analysis of the most recent census data available, generated by laboratories, universities and think tanks around the globe, and compiled with international oversight at King’s College, Oxford, alpha humans number 2,400,349,866 individuals, with the data skewing the numbers slightly in favour of the female sex. Publishing of these findings has so far been scant since officially agreement has not yet been reached because it is generally conceded that some claims of inaccuracy have been published by female scientists who consequently have submitted an official recantation of the finding’s conclusions, citing gender bias and arguing that the tallying of numbers typically and regularly slants information, from even controlled experiments, in favour of males who constitute an estimated 74% of scientists engaged in overseeing the myriad experiments. Boasting fully one quarter of the earth’s population, Alphism, increasing at an alarming rate globally as it is, must be considered to have become a dominant form of human psycho-evolution.           
     Research shows that, contrary to the expectations of the scientific community, both sexes rate, on the Sliding Harvard Compatibility and Authority Scale, as both equally likely to exhibit 97.6% of empirically established characteristics associated with the alphac, of which 421 such traits have so far been formally identified. And in each case, with an average intensity of expression of the trait firmly determined through controlled experimentation as slightly less equal at 95.2%, the conclusion becomes indisputable that alpha male and alpha female behaviours must be considered indistinguishable 97 times out of 100, with a statistical deviation of slightly less than 2%. 
         . 

 Song

I Looked Down in the Valley 
     by Leigh D
1.
I looked down in the valley this morning 
I looked down in the valley last night
I looked down in the valley 
Hoping that I’d see Sally
But she would not appear in my sight 
No she would’ve appear in my sight 

2.
Walking down that long lonesome highway 
Walking down that cold ribbon of steel 
I’m going away
I’m going to stay
Travelling on is the way that I feel 
Travelling on is the way that I feel 

3.
Look for me up there in the city
Look for me down there in the town
Look for me everywhere
But I won’t be there 
Cause I’m busy travelling on
Keeping busy travelling on

 4.
I looked down in the valley this morning
I looked down in the valley last night
I looked down in the valley 
Hoping that I’d see Sally
But she would not appear in my sight 
No she would not appear in my sight
                                                              2003

Learning to Think

 

Learning to Think

     by D Ougalasreimer

Imagine, if you will, you retired ones who have not had a thought in your lives but do not know that, imagine what the difference would have been between this and that, or such and such, had you not, and then again had you, lived a life in which you learned to think. What would it have been like, how different, if you had lived a thoughtful life? 

     We live one thought, we thinkers. Only one thought constitutes the difference between us and those who are not inclined to think. What does that mean, exactly? It means that, for the thinker, nothing is prohibited, while for the thoughtless one everything is entirely prohibited. Thus, thought is a product of freedom. Thoughtlessness derives from, and likely drives, captivity. What is it to be free? Certainly not Dylan’s idea that birds might not be free of the chains of the skyway. The exact nature of freedom will have to wait. I am not there yet. First, this bumbling here about thinking. And the story of the thoughtless one’s life.

      The thoughtless one felt prohibited. Nothing was allowed. Everything was properly restricted. She could not go into town Saturday night until she was old enough for her parents and aunts not to care if she did and, in fact, for them to encourage her to finally go. “Go girl! You’re going on 22! For goodness sake, woman, when do you think you’ll get yourself a man if not now? Yesterday they wanted you, today….” Well, like that. It’s much like the joke,“You know you’ve been married a long time when you don’t care where your spouse goes, as long as you don’t have to go along.” Also, she (the person above) began to do certain things on her own, alone, when she got to be about 19. Then it was OK. Till then she recalled her mother saying, “Don’t, Veronica! People will see! That is not what ladies do!” Later on, when her mother no longer cared, and when she was older, she did same with the familiar accompanying shame, but then it was all right. Shame, and doing it, were OK, just the way that she and Armand together in bed doing whatever came to them, within reason, felt shame and relief simultaneously most of the time that they engaged and loved. Love was shame and emptying at once, always. 

     Love is just such filling and emptying for the thoughtless. The thinking ones have so long ago looked hard at shame that they defy it eventually, and try the very things that shame tells them not to try and, trying anyway, in despite of shame, to overcome shame, they become free of shame and live shameless lives in new areas, though shame is still there for them to overcome in other areas, and this is why and how they continue to think, instead of thinking only once and then leaving it all behind once and for all. This is the one thought that takes a lifetime. It is overcoming shame, resisting shame, in all the houses of Baghdad, for instance, and everywhere, slowly winning over it, over shame, in this urban warfare. That is thought.

     Nolan was a humble man. All his life he worked for Eatons. He stole almost no merchandise. He gave up his one chance for promotion in order to let another in line ahead of him. He earned a fair wage which let him have a new vehicle every 10 or 11 years. He drank a great deal, to excess, and finally attended alcoholics anonymous with success. He turned amateur golfer in his retirement and had his own golf cart. He made wine and beer at home. He did not start drinking again, however, until he was in his late 70s. By then his brew stash filled ever nook, cranny and shelf in the basement. He died peacefully in his sleep in the car on the way to the next town to spend the afternoon in the pub with friends. 

Nolan had bad breath. That bothered his wife who asked him to think about how much suffering he caused others by continuing to drink milk and eat milk products. He did not listen to her but kept at it. He was not a thinking man. Wisely, once when he drove his pick-up into the ditch near Gretna, Manitoba, Canada, he abandoned it at first, then returned and dumped a 5 gallon container of gasoline on it and ignited it. Years later, he did the same thing to an ageing Chevrolet, which he had learned to dislike with an intensity bordering on ferocity. This time he parked it under a neighbour’s bulk farm gas barrel, opened its nozzle and let the whole tank empty into the car through an open window. Then he threw in a firecracker from behind an elm where he hid. The blast toppled the elm onto him and left him permanently wounded in the thigh. This wound his wife adored, since she could trace the scars with her slim fingers and think about her hero escaped from such danger and calamity. He never explained to Rita how it was that the car had ended up under the bowser, nor how it had caught fire. She never asked. Devoted though she was, she was not a thinker.

     Lillian did not think. She once slept with a man from her hometown after she was married and had four kids. She felt shame. She asked for forgiveness in the church where she told her whole story. She wept, she got angry, she confided it to her husband and others. She told everyone. She was proud of herself and felt the shame as a product of her bad upbringing. She trusted God increasingly. She did not learn to think.

     Evangeline did not learn to think either. She curled weekends. She never got married. She did not know why she found men unattractive. She never practised anorexia but obesity came her way naturally. She made friends with other women who were also heavy. These women in groups of twos and threes accompanied Evan on summer cruise ship cruises on the Caribbean and down the Mediterranean. They had, these girlfriends of 30 and 40, summers off, being teachers. Being elementary school teachers. They did not learn to think.

     Sniggles did learn to think. He nipped his own testicles. He did learn because he kept giving himself reproachful pain. He inflicted on himself pain which he could not talk to others about. They saw, of course. They felt revulsion. There was nothing he could do about it though. He could tell no one. He could not discuss it in forums. No Dear Abbeys would have paid him the slightest attention. No priest or minister would have said, “Ah, my, but you must be sad!” to him. They would all instead have suffered him poorly. Yes, testicle-biting Sniggles was a thinker. He learned to think the one thought that separated him from the rest. He bit, he snipped, he snapped at himself, and in his shameful, visible vulnerability he became a thinker. He thought the one thought thinkers think in their lifetimes. People would say, when they saw him sneak another nip at himself, “Sniggggguuuulss! What are you doing!” They would wag their heads and make him feel so silly and so perverse. He would lower his ears and look in stupid self-knowledge at them and whine a bit his discomfort. Then, the moment they turned the corner, he would be at it again, knowing it was improper, doing it anyway, and enjoying himself in a slanted kind of way as he hurt. 

     Yes, that is the nature of thought. It has long been known to involve just such self-immolation and satisfying pain. Think not, and you find yourself in good company. Think, and you are ruined. Think and you perform shameful perversion on yourself in public which others blink at and pity.

                                                             2007

Marty and Me, Me and Marty

Marty and Me, Me and Marty 
     by Epithalamion Leigh

May, 1969. David F Friesen invites me to bring my guitar to Red Rock Lake Bible Camp to be music leader for a group of 18 year olds having a young peoples meeting/conference/spiritual experience at the camp. I am older by 4 years than the others, except for Friesen. All goes well. I meet Marty. We Rendezvous at the lakeshore late afternoon and canoe to Turtle Island. We walk, we hold hands (me trembling, melting, everything otherworldly), I notice her wonderful green sweater, covering a small body, and that (along with something I haven’t put my finger on yet) altogether pleases me greatly. 
     On the ride home I sit in the front seat next to her. My arm touches her arm the entire way home for two hours. This is completely new territory for me. I’ve never sat so close to a female for such a period of time ever before.
     I am in love but can’t bring myself to believe that it can be so. Of course I’m not, because I haven’t known her long enough. My sister Gwen asks me if I intend to call her. This is a few days later. Right then I have almost forgotten Marty. Survival mode. I cannot believe that I would be of interest to her more than for a day or two, because I have never (tear jerker time) believed in my worth. So there you have it, I have always felt rather worthless. But have by now brilliantly succeeded in reversing this debilitation over three quarters of a century. Just kidding. 
     Mustering courage, I call her. She lives in Portage la Prairie. She teaches primary school there. It is her first year on the job as a teacher. We talk, we agree to meet at Island Park for a picnic. I bring my guitar and sing for her; “I Dreamed I saw Saint Augustine.” And “House of the Rising Sun.” And “You’re as Fine as Fine can Be.” She wears a wide-skirted, turquoise summer dress she’s made herself, and on her slight frame she appears delicate and fragile to me. Her face dazzles me. I feel lucky I’m short-sighted! I get that wrong about her too. When we embrace it feels like I’ve got hardly anything in my arms. 
     That year I live in Winnipeg’s north end, on Dominion Street, at my brother Jim’s and my sister-in-law Marg’s place. Close to the Armory.  During the next year, Marty and I bus back-and-forth between Winnipeg and Portage la Prairie every weekend. (Jim: “Doug, you and Marty can’t sleep together if you’re going to stay at our house.”)  I have a small room upstairs with a child-size desk where I try to do my first year university English literature assignments. Being with Marty is so much more fun than writing essays for Robert Green, for Professor Robert Green. I get an F on my first essay and suggest to him in his office that I should probably pack it in. He tells me, in that unfamiliar-to-me British accent of his, not to be so hasty; that I am essentially a good writer, but a verbose one. I continue, I make some writing/thinking changes towards plain style, I get a C+ on my next essay and I end up near the top of the class by the end of the year. 
     I drink wine as I study. My nascent habit should have suggested to me by now (and did, sort of) the detour I will take in the next three decades. I start making homemade wine at the age of 15, I intermittently (too often) drink too much for 30 years, I have my very Last Drink on the way home from the cottage in my 1966 Mazda B 2200. I’m alone and stop outside of the pub in the west end of Kenora. (Ontario, Northwestern Ontario, if you are not familiar with Kenora.) It’s a couple of glasses of draft beer. I have tried to quit many times before with varied success, in Thompson, in Grand Rapids, in Winnipeg, in Winkler. This time it sticks. I leave half a glass of beer on the Formica. I get up and get out of there and drive the rest of the way home in my truck. 
     July,1970. We marry and move to Grand Rapids, Manitoba. We teach there for two years, then enrol at the University of Manitoba for another two years before excepting work in Thompson, Manitoba. The process of getting that job proves to be quite exciting because of a strange case of mistaken identity. The seven years that we spend in Thompson are fraught with experience, some of which, not all of which, is destined to see a retelling on these pages. In subsequent stories. 
      In 1981, Marty and I return to Winnipeg where for a number of years, while living in a side-by-side in Fort Richmond, a suburb in the southern part of the city, Marty kindly takes care of the three children that we by this time have somehow acquired. I enter an MA, and eventually a doctoral, program. So, to review, I switch from teaching primary school in Grand Rapids to high school in Thompson and, in this final stage, for the next 25 years, to lecturing at the University of Manitoba. Marty studies too and her area of specialty is psychology. The only course of hers that I recall us discussing is Statistics with a Dr. Kesselman who, not so popular with his charges, passes only a small percentage of the students in his classes.
     When I finish my MA degree and Marty receives her baccalaureate (1983), we struggle to decide what to do for the next number of years. Whether fortunately or not, we choose to move to Winkler, MB where I take a job in high school English and Marty stays home with the children. My career in winkler lasts approximately three months. Well, actually not that long; two months, more like. At this point (blessed with a cavernous bout of clinical depression), I begin to write fiction and eventually (1990) enroll in graduate school for my doctorate. In 1995 I become Dr. Reimer. In November Marty remarkably dives into a teaching job while I recover at home. 
     Probably the most memorable moment in which I experience the success I have achieved happens the day I pass my orals. I tell the class of 50 first year literature students (Eng. 4.120)  that I’ve just become Dr. Reimer! A student raises her hand and asked whether from now on they have to call me Dr. Reimer. I say, no, that’s fine, you can call me Mr. Reimer. Another person asks whether it’s OK if they call me Reimer. Yep, I concede, with a pretended reluctance. Another enters what is quickly becoming a game and asks if they can call me Douglas. I say, sure, no problem! A student in the back row shouts, Can we call you Dougie? And I say, happy at the fact of life in these kids, Absolutely not! I draw the line at Dougie. And, of course, lots of laughter.
     Outside of continuing to learn to live together, the rest of our married life is unremarkable. Well, not entirely, I suppose. If I thought that our earlier married life occasionally went off the rails and was most difficult and that all would get easier, then what I think now is that the mature period of our cohabitation has had us encountering more difficulties than ever. Life does not get easier as you get older, especially if experiences before this in the years preceding have meant that you are not overly judgemental nor overly worried about following conventions and conforming to social proprieties. Maybe for the better, maybe not, living in Thompson taught us that, if it taught us anything. It taught us to think about our life less in terms of how we might best benefit the community, let’s say of Winkler, than it taught us how to navigate an imagination and a life of excitement. It goaded us into attempting to walk shoulder to shoulder instead of face to face through everything the world offers. Ideas became unscary to us. Homosexuality, alcoholism and addictions, death and dying, friends who seemed not to understand and were judgemental and yet we stayed friends, the absence of family, the end of the familiar, both of people close to you and those far away, and many, many other ideas that often cause anxiety in us humans somehow didn’t overwhelm us. 
     Music suddenly became big in our family life. In ‘78 I bought a ‘73 Martin D28 acoustic guitar. It was, next to family, my great love. Daughter Jess and I formed a bluegrass band, “The Doug and Jess Band.” We sang at numerous festivals over the years. The band became my focus that, to a degree (a fairly big one), wrenched my stranglehold attention from philosophy to it. How exciting vanning it up to Smithers and Missouri Valley, or flying to Toronto, Ottowa and Nova Scotia, to sing at their venues and festivals. Little grandkids, Marty and us, the four-piece band, doing what we loved more than anything else. 
     One other thing that strikes me at the moment as worth narrating, or intruding as a point in this narration, is the fact that together Marty and I built a cabin in the northwestern Ontario woods near a lake, classic in its coniferous forest, deep blue waters, trout, muskellunge and even bears trying to get in at the door now and then. The cabin was and is very beautiful and it sits within a stone‘s throw of the edge of the lake. That is about all I have to say just now except that in the process of the last 20 years of our married life Marty has become an excellent writer and I have to come to make very attractive diamond willow walking sticks.
     
     
     

The Freewheeling Hansel and Gretel

[2009]

 The Freewheeling Hansel and Gretel 
     by Loug Conformity-is-Crucial       
     Leimer

Grim tales told by Hans Christian Anderson. Christian tales not told by the Grimms brothers. Hansel and Gretel meet the Grimm Reaper. Grimy landscapes from a white porch. Anderson died, Christian lived and Hans existed as a paraplegic, though his surgeon predicted that he would someday walk despite sitting in the direct line of the semi’s impact. 

     Hans told the story of his tragedy often to whoever he could get to listen (over time virtually everyone) using placards and grunting noises, prodding his sister, Grimmamma, until she reluctantly contributed in the telling of the story to the newcomer, or to the ones not audacious enough (given the raucous nature of the said Hans) to walk out of the room the second they recognized the persistent high-pitched calling and squealing of this wounded, gurney-bound, mobility-challenged person. 
     He had not the use of his arms and hands, nor the full employment of his mouth, but did of his bum. He sported the most alacritous anus. He had learned how to vigourously pinch his buttocks together to grasp a particular cue card and hold it legibly in the air by thrusting his cheeks sharply upwards before the faces of those conversing above him. 
      These cue cards outlined the essential facts of his accident.  It was amazing to behold him sort through these, some 50 of them, in a jiffy, rifling them about expertly with one of his buttocks as if it were a digit. He would get someone there to lick the right cheek as one does one’s pinky or forefinger to wet it in order to get purchase on a dry page. Then, with aplomb, quick as a wink, he would—sometimes to the accompaniment of a small fart, or even the decisive breaking of wind—find, take, lift, and display the cue card he’d been looking for and in print carry the story further, at times with the assistance of the reluctant offices of his sibling amanuensis. 
     He had special trousers and drawers constructed in aid of these endeavours, with folds and apertures through which he could, at will, thrust his gifted bum, an organ luckily unaffected by his otherwise omnipresent paraplegicity. Someone had to turn him over, however, to make these tale-telling achievements possible. Frequently ignored at first when he pled to be so rotated, his entreaties would speedily crescendo in volume and insistence till they came forward so stridently, and with such certain phonic heft, that the groans of oiliphants, and the barking of huge Arctic oxen were nothing to compare. 
     An incipient impatience, a growing irksomeness at the sudden heightening of bothersome noise in the room, would commonly cause bystanders to respond and assist him in his entreaties. Immediately, the moment he got
turned over, and in a flash, they would be treated to another series of cue card sentences, brought to them slickly by his dumb, breathing, infrequently scrubbed, continually appearing and disappearing nether flesh. Ah, Bartleby! Ah, humanity! O Spectacle! O oppression!
     Now, on a day when downtrodden Hans had fallen ill and died, Grimmamma at last found her future husband. Alone, willful, ill disposed to play and prancing, the newly discovered fellow sat in a nookling by a small brook and read some work or other (of which no hint will be given here). She espied of him. Drawing nearer, she soon convinced him to both board her and then woo her. Till by evening she wore his ring, one his grandmother had left in his keeping, he being oldest, till his young and lovely sister would be of age to marry. The ring fit Grimmamma poorly, but it would do for now. A preacher found and employed, they set about the production of children on the spot. After the preacher had expressed his surprise, they ate and drank and went to bed, and that was the pattern they followed for the rest of their days together. They divorced a few months later and she remained unmarried from that day fourth, did Grimmamma. 

Dorky’s Daydream

 Dorky’s Day Dream 
     By Douglas Dorkheimer the Second

Dorky (we called him Dorky in those days). He would, now and then, tell anyone who listened a story so quaint and curious it invariably drew embarrassed laughter all around ifi km pdzz a and the shaking of heads in disbelief. Magic island, my foot, you could see them thinking. And fairies and royalty, right! But on each occasion Dorky gave his account with such innocent enthusiasm and with such irreproachable, precise repetition that listeners sensed a new range of (how should I put it) possibilities within the workings of nature. Their senses underwent a widening of sorts in all but the most callous (or impaired among them), an expansion of mind that left each of them slightly less certain of the rules that govern nature and spirit in this world. And this is the story he told, introducing it with the assertion that you could set your clock by every detail in it, all of it one hundred and one percent true. (Reader, I regret that my rudimentary Italian limits the accuracy of my account. But, as Holmes himself often said about his own imprecision, “If at first you don’t succeed, try and try again.” Damned wise that.)
     “You would have had to be there,” Dorky would always continue, “as I was, having stowed away on the Argyle at Carthage bound for Italy and home. Within three days of departure, favoured by a pleasant, strong sou’wester, we ran with little warning into a change of weather so fierce and so precipitous we quickly lost all our rigging. Left with no choice in the matter, we flew before the winds to parts of the darkening seas known to no one.” 
     Anyone with half an imagination would have left his warm seat at the fireside to hear such a tale. Stormy crossings of the sea and shipwreck on an island with great loss of life and luggage appeal universally to men. Who would not stop whatever he was doing to find out if anyone survived and what they got up to on a deserted island in the middle of nowhere, unmarked on any maps known to man? So inevitably, half a dozen of us layabouts migrated to Dorky’s side to hear him tell it again. Always the tale struck us as newly minted, as something just now reported by a returning sailor. Or as if the tale, like blue jeans fresh out of the laundry, had undergone a sea change in Dorky’s mind and taken on wonderful and before unconsidered layers of mystery and meaning.  
     “The Argyle slewed and wallowed before the gale,” Dorky started, his voice a hoarse whisper, eyes fear-widened, “its masts down and overboard and its sails and rigging long since swept tangled and torn out to sea. The captain, a man of great valour, courageous to a fault, worked in vain to pilot his crippled vessel, calling all the while for the dejected sailors to take courage, calls lost in the demonic howling of the storm.” At each moment Dorky’s hands moved about in imitation of the good captains’ on the ship’s wheel and his features showed wildly the horror of the coming destruction. 
     “Oh! The confusion and terror among them all!” Dorky called, his head shaking in fruitless denial. “And, oh! The wild eyes and desperate prayers of the passengers! You must know that, to make matters worse, aboard this vessel we carried the king of Italy himself (for whose safety the crew felt deeply, fearfully responsible) as well as his retinue of both members of the royal family and acquaintances.  
     The storm grew steadily more savage so that the furious waves rose high above us and then fell with such a vicious weight upon the decks that before long our great ship broke deep and began to take on water. In terror sailors leapt over the rail, only to be immediately swept from our sight. In vain did our good captain implore us to remain steadfast and keep to our posts but none heard him above the roaring of sea and gale. 
    “And so it was that when the ship began to come apart the men all gave themselves to the embrace of the waves and the mercy of their maker. No one of them knew of the fate of the others, each grieving in his heart the loss of all the rest to their graves. 
     “But wonders befell this their world now (and I advise patience to you, my good readers, for I shall make all plain in good time). Finding himself with great good luck a few arm strokes from a ship’s mast the king swam to it and, grasping it in tired arms, gave himself up in despair to the water, wherever it might take him. And he was not the only one for whom flotsam provided a temporary salvation. I, too, Dorky Briggs Columbiner, almost at the end of my strength, found a shocking refuge that arrived not from heaven above but from the dark chaotic depths below. Facing down into the water, in the very act of giving myself over to it, I beheld, to my utter astonishment, a smoky and ghostly shape rising up towards me! Oh! My heart! The apparition began to clarify and suddenly i saw it to be an upturned face with its eyes starting from their sockets and its visage wild and fierce fixed on mine. And I knew the angel of death had come to claim me. 
     Then, to my amazement, I recognized the face of Quebecette, my good companion! His head broke the surface next to mine. We stared open-mouthed at each other. What else could possibly still happen? Surely, these little miracles threatened us! They must mean us some harm. They must mean the coming of…of… of a disaster greater even than the loss of the Argyle! Or else, maybe, just maybe (much less likely though more desirable) they presaged some wonderful thing still before us for which our miserable selves were being preserved. 
     This man, this fine friend, this Labin Lois Quebecette and I had initially distrusted each other. But that enmity soon diminished during the early days of our voyage. Within a week we’d found ourselves captive to friendship, bound together in a profoundness that even catastrophe could not hope to diminish. And then disaster had accomplished precisely such a split! This tempest had ripped us apart and left us with nothing but the hope for a quick death. 

Reimer’s Loose in Darp Altneijv

Reimer’s Loose in Darp Altneijv 
     by Clandestine Dougie 

Mom selected where we were to throw the slop. The kitchen gathered about 5 gallons of it every week. In summer it got tossed who knows where. In winter, though, it’s “traces” were more readily noticeable. If not Rudy, then I carried the pail out of the kitchen into the garage and out the back door where we stood on the doorstep and slung the murky mess in the direction of the big evergreen just a dozen yards away. Of course, the slop froze during the night. By the end of winter the frozen pile stood 2 to 3 feet high, often partly covered in snow, except in April when it began to thaw and smell. In later years I wondered if we were the only family in all of Altona who had that much hillbilly in us. I don’t recall any other family slinging its  slop out the back door of the house. I don’t recall any other family throwing slop onto the yard anywhere, except ours. I have felt a modicum of shame about our rudeness of manners, but mostly I have been proud of my family. Of us Reimers. 
     Once Rudi, my eight year old brother, younger by 3 1/2 years, jumped up and hung onto the attic opening just above the landing between our house and the attached garage. Since there was no lid over this opening, you could jump up and hold onto the two by fours that framed it. I heard him scream. I ran out the door to see him hanging there. I asked him what was the matter and he sounded incoherent. I believed something was wrong so I grabbed his legs and began to pull. I thought he was afraid of letting go. He screamed even louder. I tried pulling harder, calling for him to let go! He bellowed twice as hard. And then I stopped and noticed that with his eyes and his head he was attempting to get me to push him up. His eyes and face were making frantic up movements. So, I grabbed his legs again and pushed him higher. Now he let go the “hole” and I dropped him down beside me. Blood streamed down his hand. Apparently there had been a nail sticking right through his finger. It was bent in such a way that there was nothing he could do to loosen it because his weight pulled him down further onto the nail. No place his feet could reach to push against. He asked me, crying, “Why didn’t you lift me up? Why did you just keep pulling me down? Why were you so stupid?” What could I do to explain? How do you defend against accidental stupidness?
     Dad hated carrying out the cash-and-carry pail. Situated in the basement immediately beside, and in the sleepy warmth of, the Booker furnace, it needed emptying at least once a week. I knew that he hated the job because he inevitably waited half a week too long and it would fill up to and over the brim. The emptying process meant first successfully lifting the 5 gallon pail out of the tin container with the seat and lid. Once out of there (which feat itself took a prodigious effort, as anyone knows about 5 gallon pails full of an uncomfortable mixture of solids and liquids that have you also gagging while exerting). Once up and over, the 80 pound pail travelled the width of the basement, moved up a flight of eight stairs, got walked through the garage 20 feet to the back door, was lifted up onto the doorstep and then stepped gingerly out onto the icy backdoor landing and from there (in the fresh air) onwards to the toilet, the biffy. 
     Two full 5 gallon pails are hard enough for a man to carry. But one! One massy pail with its inevitable imbalance, pulling hard at either the right or left side of the body, is triply difficult. The distance from the back door to the outhouse was easily 150 feet. Oh Gauntlet! Oh Narrow Way! Oh Nemesis! You see, all winter the snow deepened in the back yard. That 150 feet became a monstrous obstacle course. The hard path, just ten inches wide where dad‘s steps had trodden it down (because it was not the path not taken!), increasingly deepened as winter wore on. Actually, the path increasingly rose upward and simultaneously packed down as more snow fell. And on each side of that hard ten inch wide path the snow rose and stayed soft. 
     I know that you know what I am about to tell you. I’m lying in my bunkbed in the basement, I hear dad scrabbling near the furnace and I realize what he’s about to do. When he gets to the first set of stairs I hear him say, “Oh, no! Obviously, the overfull container has sloshed and dribbled. I hear him proceed through the back door and then I don’t hear anything for a while.      
     However, shortly, from somewhere halfway down the path, I do hear a terrible outcry. A single word! And I know exactly what has occurred. It comes out later in dribs and drips. The snow beside the path has risen high enough to mean that he’s had to hold the 5 gallons higher than before so the bottom doesn’t scrape the snow, tilt and spill. 
     Suddenly, the unthinkable happens. His foot slips off the path and into the soft stuff and his body tilts sideways and he falls completely flat on his back, face up, into the snow, as if he’s about to make a snow angel. Unfortunately, the pail does not tip the way any normal human would like it to. Instead, its bottom hits hard against the uneven snow, the pail loses its proper center of balance, lays down on its side and empties itself immediately and entirely over the body of the person who is now lying bug-eyed in the snow, who seconds before was walking gingerly upright in the direction of two-holes. 
     Now, covered from head to toe in filth, dad jumps up raging in denial, and then in disbelief. Actually, no, he does not jump up, but struggles and writhes in a futile panic (probably likenable to Jacob desperately wrestling the angel) to get his body upright as quickly as possible. In order to do that, he has to flail around in the snow, in the brown stuff, until he is able to turn over onto his side and then onto all fours (face likely nose-deep in the snow, or nearest facsimile) and then that way slowly raise himself up to sitting, and eventually standing.
      From the basement, my first indication that there has been an incident is the sound of dad‘s voice calling out very loudly one word only,    
     “No!”
     Then again, a minute later,
     “No!”
     And two minutes after that, 
     “No!” A pause of 10 seconds followed by “No!” 
     Then again, “No! No! No!” No swearing or lengthy harangue but just a repetition of the single negative, as if in an attempt at whitewashing the event, of erasing the past. 
     All is quiet for a bit and I have decided that things are OK, and then I hear a sudden even stronger declaration, “No!” Pause. “No!”
    Intermittently, throughout the day, dad breaks into this particular song. This song of one word only, “No!” and then later suddenly any old time out of the blue (brown, really), 
     “No! No!”
     And tomorrow he teaches Sunday School, hoping, I’m sure, that the smell hasn’t stuck around, uncleanable by even “…all great Neptune’s ocean.”

Urgubabba Embers

 Urgubabba Embers
     by Doug the One-Eyed Wonder

President Moomoogabi reached over the embers of the sweat fire and asked for cake. He received it from the hands of the bowed figure directly across from him. On his right, a quaint and huddled form waited. When that one had received the goodie from the president, he in turn passed it directly over the fire to Pulvis, the priest in charge of the event. Pulvis likewise, after touching it again to his groin, reached it towards his right and that one shook his head. Pulvis offered it to the one on his left and, when that goodly person also declined to receive the morsel, he popped it into his own mouth. He smacked his lips loudly, as a sign of his enjoyment, and then asked for another.
     “One taste is never enough!” he remarked, and ate a second and then a third slice of kangaberry cake.
     “Nice!” he intoned and stood up to leave. 
     “ Not so fast!“ Moomoogabi growled. “Sit down! I’m not finished here!” Pelvis did as he was told. He pouted. In his heart he knew that one day this man would pay for inflicting such repeated humiliations on the sacred one. He would not be so treated. Moomoo looked about the fire. He paused till all were quiet and then spoke. 
     “You, my eunech, deserve to be blessed with material wealth if not with the warmth of a wife. You are so deprived year after year, and you give such an abundance of skill and wisdom despite your thin life that I am in immense awe of your goodness. Here, sir, take this gold. Each year that I am in this position of leadership you shall receive a present of equal worth as well as coinage enough to feed and clothe you and all of your relatives.” Moomoogabi swallowed, smiled and handed the necklace to the surprised holy man. A bow, scraping of feet, and the priest fell prostrate before his beneficent leader.
     “Thank you! Thank you!” was all he could say. Over and over he repeated his thanks until Moomoo told him to stop or he might recant his promise.