Hankki Pondered These Things and Kept Them in His Heart

Hankki Pondered These Things

and Kept Them in His Heart

D. R. Hamm, Ph.D

pigs are funny are they not

the way they feast on slop

and cause no end of silliness

about who’s out and who is in

they can’t be trusted to be good

do not behave the way they should

eat whatever’s in the pen

fallen man or next of kin

Heave Ho! Ho did as he was told. “Yo!” he shouted, and pulled at the yardarms a little. His heart wasn’t in it. He hated jibs, masts, yardarms, hawsers, cleats, bows, sterns, albatrosses, captains, pilots, steamers, tugs, Tahiti, reefs, dug-out canoes, coral islands, lagoons, bare-breasted savages, Mosquito Coasts, wild surfs, surfboards, hatches, holds, cargo, topknots, chiefs, colorful fishes, becalming, wind, sea creatures, rope and boatswains. He preferred female students working archeological digs on the Aegean, or around the Horn. At one, sun almost tore off their clothes, and at the other, wind did the same. That he liked. Wind and sun tearing clothes. The actual baring  and exposing he cared for only mildly.

       Hankki Ho had grown up in rural Tanzania. His father loved farming and hogs. Not other livestock so much, but grunters. Kine lugging their milk-laden bags, pullets filling puffy croups, and horses with their endless whinnying for love and feed, he tolerated. Swine, grunting, sweating, nuzzling into the dirt and dross, he adored. And Hank had come grudgingly himself to admire porkers. They would, the two of them, father and son, stand there watching over the wooden rail at the trough while the slop, with its smells of bananas, onions, yam peels, human waste, dead chickens and such, mixed up in a bit of oats, lots of water, and a handful of cheap salt, bobbed about Billy’s, Nan’s, and Chiffy’s snouts. Tschlop, tschlopp, tschloppff. It made the men hungry.

       Hank’s father, a priest of the Translutchswa cast, serving the lower, lower, middle levels of Swazialinga County, and taking his pay in corn, bread, piglets, strong employables for the week, help about the farm, and rides into town on tractors, often left home for days on end and then it fell on Hankki to be the man of the house. He hated this. His mothers and sisters did, too. His younger brothers simply smiled and disappeared for the entire period of the elder’s absence. When Aronimo, his father, returned again from Swil, his eyes would seem to see little. He would ask Hankki how it had gone, but the answers mattered not. Did you service Bottle? Was the bull available? Have the chickens had their fill and are they happy? Could you see a difference in the attitude of Groaner towards Truckswi? Hankki answered as he wished—yes to this, no to that, maybe to something else—but his father paid no heed and in a few days he would be back to his perspicuous self.

       Once, when his mother got up out of bed on one of those occasions when Aron left, it was the middle of the night. Hankki called for her not to leave him cold. The nights had grown chilly early that year and one thought of snow on the mountains causing these dips. She did not listen to him but went outside and returned hours later when the dawn’s light almost showed her outline coming down the path. Hankki determined that he would tell Aron about this but he kept it to himself for now. One day, maybe. When his sisters looked at him mornings they had blank and thoughtless faces. They said little. He could hardly wait for father to come home again. He left all this to go to sea. When he was at sea, life became happier for him, not because he loved the sea but because he hated home. Not because he hated home, but because he so fervently wished to leave it behind and start a new life absolutely and unalterably other than the one that had sprung him up.

       “Go now to Canaan,” rung in his ears one morning in May, 1987. What the hell did that mean, he wondered. Go to Canaan. Go to Canaan. He was not going anywhere near a place with a name like that and one that insisted on calling him to itself with such persistence. He looked up “Canaan,” found its location on a map, and spent the last of his savings on a ticket to the Cretan island of Samoa. Here, among the Dingbat and dancing ladies, he felt happy, unaccountable for, without purpose and daring. Left alone by fate, family and friends, he got along marvelously in the world. When things called him, tapped him on the shoulder, made him out to be special, required this or that of him, trained him to march, speak well, work so and so, learn skills, and in other ways prepared him, he had to go and go fast to some new hideout. Hankki had his life to himself in the city. He rented a crouder up above a grocery on Swine Street. This way he felt close to food. He noticed, before he agreed to sign, that across the street a billiard sign hung, and so he'd have access to fights and fun, a regular theatre always there for him, money or not. The street, narrow and smelly, reminded him of life’s pleasures. You got sweaty negotiating both, and knew by your sweat where you were. Over the ally behind his nest, an old woman sang mornings hanging up wash and, on inquiry, Hankki found that she laundered for others, so cleanliness of dress, too, had its burnish and application now. Blocks to the left, the city’s financial district gave him hope and news of the flows of large amounts of cash. He liked that. Some streets to the right, the dockage gave him work when he needed it. Load lumber on Tuesdays into a ship bound for Haiti. Offload coal on Fridays and leave it in piles on the warf for untouchables to pick up in their shoulder baskets and set off for homes far away, uphill from the sea. Maybe dresses and skirts next Thursday for the bazars up on Kensingsi Square. Always some money to be made if need be.

       First he had been to sea, and then he had resided in Samoa. He grew old there. He refused to marry. He lived without fuss or fanfare. He had sex seldom, and when he did it was often with chickens. He preferred chickens. Their feathers and everything. Now and then he smoked cigars and drank hot rum bankros, but mostly he stayed sober and stayed away from drugs. He slept only in his own bed and never, under any conditions, allowed anyone to crawl under his sheets or stretch out on his mattress, no matter how tired, no matter how convincing. Goats bothered him. He had a special relationship with them. They winked when he approached. Total stranger goats gloated over him. Complete foreigner goatlings pranced when he neared and acted as if he would immediately fondle and make much of them. Goats had a certain swa riveri about them in his presence, which he resented and ultimately came to feel rage and disgust over. Nevertheless, he treated them with respect and they did not exploit him. He died under the hooves of goats and that rankles anyone who saw how much love he gave them in the end despite his lifelong antipathy for these same.

       Nevertheless, for other animals he had whole sets of complex feelings and behaviors. For goslings, for instance, he felt repugnance. For chickadees he sweated and abased himself. For ducks and their offspring he rose to states of cheerfulness that no other animals could achieve in him. For rabbits he experienced some rather embarrassing emotions, which their softness and big, trusting eyes immediately suggest to the reader. And for crawdads he eventually mastered his fear and learned to care as if he had never found them difficult.

       When he died, no one attended his funeral. For the ladies of Crete, digging as is their wont in the gravel beds of the old Roman Empirium, where the paths are straight and Alithea remains unknown, life went on as before. Hankki’s funeral mass was presided over by a chicken with the odd name of Chanticleermeter Singh.  

            

       

Great with Rhododendrons

Great with Rhododendrons

       By Douglas Parenti the Unremarkable

              “A poem is worth a thousand words.”

Lister Sinclair   
          

                        Einstein’s social philosophy: “Give them

                                    An inch and they’ll take a mile.”

People waste fifty years of their lives boozing. Or, they waste sixty-five and die. Or, they waste their best years boozing and then quit at about forty and feel glad they did, often becoming evangelists against drink. I never minded people drinking, and getting into terrible trouble doing so, until my own kids had the disease and then my involvement became intense. Now it is time to leave those fears behind and let the girl grow up, alcoholic or non, drunk or not, without career and purpose or with.

       My name is Martimer Spanish. I live at sixty-three Wessexfieldeaurop Drive. The trees here are splendid. Basswoods line the perimeter of my seven acres. Rabbits live in the hedges of the Hyena Shrubs and produce babies that I catch and cook. My freezer has venison tenderloin in it from my own back yard. Raccoon meat is savory and becomes nice and tender breaded with dandelion flour and marinated in gooseberry preserves. Across the yard, a quarter mile from my sunroom window, lies the creek where I bathe in summer in a shallows I had excavated by Hermann the Human Backhoe. He can dig a grave in an hour and a half. He charges three hundred and fifty dollars for the work. He’s rich. He told me that to buy a mechanical digger and keep it maintained would cost him more than he can make doing it by hand. Barbary shoots in the swamp willows near the west end by the creek taste of menthol candies, slightly, but not as strong as juniper berries taste ginny. A substitute for cod liver oil is the oils extracted from the bark of the Swedish Pine that I planted a row of down the eastern side of the yard back in the early sixties. They tower over everything now and I hear them clearly at night soughing in the wind, though they are a hundred yards distant. I have planted a few acres of grass fit for human consumption. It tastes slightly of baker’s yeast but it works marvels on the digestion. Prunes I dry myself from the plums that grow wild along the shore of Banjo Creek.

       And that reminds me. All musical culture is a waste of time and dangerous to the health of individuals. When I drank a great deal in my twenties, I listened to bluegrass music and it drove me to wish for more drink, not less. Give up music when you give up drink and your life will be happier for it. Rhododendrons are good for you, despite the official cautions that they poison the stomach. I have myself consumed many a plant of the Russian variety and survived. Taken with coffee and sweetened with a little raspberry syrup, those leaves taste a great deal like pancakes dipped in peach nutmeg. To drink with rhododendrons, I recommend, besides coffee, Vasavean Cocktail. It is a concoction of juices from wild plants that have all been named on the container, and is available at most health food outlets. I do not recognize most of the ingredient names. The only one I knew was the Pristinia Wart Shrub. I had no idea that it contained any liquid inside the shoots at all, dry and withered as the stems always appear. Nevertheless, the drink is fine with rhododendrons. It comes across with slow increase to the surprise of the palette and especially registers its most sticky claret flavors near the back of the mouth, sour and sweet both, like fine red cherries.         

Gimli

Gimli

Character: a son of a whore

Setting: Gimli, Lake Winnipeg, Mb

Plot: No denouement; no expected resolution; no foreshadowing; just an encounter with a whore and a reminder that he is—his memory tells him—a descendent of a whore himself. He sort of likes whores. He dislikes women (somewhat, for someone who dislikes very little) who are not whores.

Theme: People are neither good nor bad, but are what they are and they won’t be people much longer in the humanist tradition.

Point of view: A son of a god tells this? Let’s see.

She charged two dollars for minor favors, and six for the larger ones, prices a small town shoemaker might accept. She managed quite well. Got by. That was the main thing, as far as she was concerned. When citizens of Gimli got up in arms about her being there at all, much less permanently ensconced in rooms in the beautiful Harbourfront Hotel, she paid little attention. She smiled—a little sadly—to herself, in fact, when she read the Gimli Gazette’s headlines to the effect that certain women who made their wages soliciting should be got to leave town by hook or by crook.

       Things got worse, though, and then she did think of leaving. Possibly for Riverton further down the lakeshore. Riverton posed a problem, though. Not enough of a customer base. Even if she included the fishermen from Gimli who docked their skiffs there and worked from that shore, she still doubted if she could put bread and butter on the table. When the going got rough, she phoned her “agent” in Sandy Hook for advice. He was seldom there for her when she needed him. He was unreliable. He took his share and spent it and gave her virtually nothing in return. An ear, at times such as this, but that was all.

       The reason she thought about going at all arose for her as a result of an incident with local authorities. The police seasonally pestered her because of certain husbands enjoying themselves too freely. Now, again, this year, there was a kafuffle. This last incident happened at breakfast where she sat alone on a cold February morning. A great Hollywood actor, unbeknownst to her, had arrived in town and was staying at the very hotel in which she had rooms. He was, apparently, expected at breakfast and just as her eggs arrived and her coffee had been refilled, with the cream put in, two policemen stopped at her table and said they needed her to come with them for a short while. She smiled but felt no joy. She understood the general intent, if not the specific reason for their sudden attention.

       “No,” she said. “I’m finishing my breakfast first.” She looked at each of them and then started on her eggs. One took her by the arm and the other put his hand on her shoulder. She leapt up and shouted, “Police!” Of course, that made them smile. She smiled, too. The waitresses looked through the double swing doors from the kitchen. A few eaters at the other tables pretended not to have seen or heard. Once more the officers took hold of her. She was about to give in when a greying man of fifty stepped into the room and, taking one look around him, called to them.

       “What did she do?” he said, pointing. “Was she bothering anyone?” He asked this so simply and with such interest that the men in blue stopped and walked up to him.

       “She’s bothering the clientele here, even if she’s not soliciting at the moment,” they said. The stranger glanced from her to them and said, “Please, just let her stay. There is no need for this, is there? She surely has a right to eat here just as I do, and as those three over there do?” He waited, watching the men who seemed moved by his words. They glanced at each other.

       “But we have an order to arrest her. She has broken the law again and we have to confine her. What choice do we have?” The tall officer with the thin face and pink nose blew into a hanky. The other put his hand over his own nose to keep out airborne germs. The waitresses had been joined by the cook, brown and red spatters on his apron and his hat on crooked, as well as the dressy manager of the hotel. The manager made moves as if he should enter the discussion. He desisted, maybe because he himself on occasion spent some time in Raymonas’s room.

       “You have never broken the law, I take it?” the stranger said. “If you have, your logic is weak, you know. Just give her a warning and let her go. It won’t hurt anyone. And, anyway, I’ll write a letter of commendation for both of you and it might well result in your promotions instead of anything else.”

       Wagging their heads, after a few moments, and smiling as if friends with the stranger, the two nodded and walked out, though not without a look of disapproval at the woman.

       “Join me, Raymona,” the stranger said. “Let’s have a real breakfast, shall we? Bacon, eggs, hashbrowns, and even, if they serve that in winter, walleye fillets!” He winked at her and took her elbow. This time the woman made no move to remonstrate. She did not yell “Police!” Nor did she look sadly at the floor as if she knew the moves. Over at the door, and even from the portal to the kitchen, she heard a name mentioned.

       “Harrison Ford! That’s him! I want his autograph. I wonder if he’ll give it to me?” and so on. She had been rescued by Ford himself! She thrilled at the turn of events. How would she be able to believe this herself later, or ever convince anyone what had happened, she thought. And Ford was thinking, my mother was a virtuous woman, but she told me about my ancestry and it is not pure. Five generations back my maternal ancestor was a whore in  some village in North Carolina and she had more trysts than you could shake a toboggan at. And Jesus. Jesus’s great, great, great, great grandmother was a whore, history tells us.     

       

Garbage Cans Along the Beach

Garbage Cans Along the Beach

       By D (Twilled Curtains) R

Pukatowagon is hotter in May

Than boys on a nude beach at close of the day

Count your blessings name them one by one,” Enid Muswagon sang to herself as she bent over the stove and fished out the quarter that had fallen behind it. She added it to the jar of bus change and replaced it in the cupboard above the butter door. She had come from Mission Station this morning on Main Street. Drunks and poor people lined up quite a way down the block, starting at eleven o’clock. The soup was good. She had eaten two bowls and a couple of buns. Last night’s wine sat uneasy in her stomach.

       “A penny for your thoughts!” Count Gordon called through the window. He lived in the apartment adjacent to hers and separated by a couple of feet. He could reach in if he wished and borrow the dish detergent on her windowsill. She thought about how she needed to keep the lights off when she paraded around at night without clothes on sometimes if she had to go into the kitchen for some reason. Sleepy, she forgot now and then, and assumed that the Count had seen her naked on more than one occasion.

       “What’s that smell?” Enid called to him and he stuck his head into her window. He did not seem to know what she was referring to and she explained it to him.

       “It smells like your dog came in here last night and shat all over my floor. It also smells, on top of that, as if your sewer pipes had exploded and plastered junk and sour stuff over half my apartment. Not only that, but it stinks like rotten meat left in the sun for a week and then dipped in old castor oil.” She returned to the window where the Count lounged and listened. He pulled out a pipe and put tobacco in it and lit it.

       “That would explain my stomach!” he said. “The tobacco will help.” He puffed voluminously and sent the billows in the direction of her window. He was not fully dressed, in a sleeveless t-shirt and jeans, and cited the early hour as an excuse.

“Would you care for a cuppa?” he asked and disappeared and returned in a minute with a steaming mug that he reached over her windowsill. He whistled tunelessly and then sang a happy melody from a musical she did not recognize. The words were foreign, probably Italian. She asked him what the story was. He told her it concerned the death of a young boy who had loved a girl very much who did not want him to love her.

“That is very sad,” she said. “Does she die, too?” She leaned out the window and took no notice of the traffic that slid by to her left on Alamont. An older man stood between the buildings fiddling with his fly. Enid sipped the coffee and listened.

“Who told you that?” he said. After a minute he continued. “The girl dies many years later in an accident. She falls from a window where she has been sitting alone looking out of over a lake. One knows that she has been thinking of very little for she sings at that moment about the seagulls swooping over the bay. It ends with the ambulance arriving and taking her away, while out on the lake boats ply their trade and the wind continues its gentle soughing. Smoke from the peat fire burns the eyes of passersby.”

Enid thanked him and returned to her preparations. She was getting ready to return to the Mission Station. She loaded her minivan with her amp and guitar and mikes and stands and drove across town. She got help unloading and setting up from a few of the regulars there who faithfully came to hear her. She sang half a dozen numbers for the down and outers after their supper of fish and potatoes and then packed up and drove home again. She sat in the window in the warm June night air and listened to the few seagulls still squawking around the garbage cans along the beach. Smoke from a campfire on the point drifted past her apartment. It tasted nice on her tongue.