Sniggles, Again (or, Courting Gravel)

[Written about 2000, edited this week]

Sniggles, Again (or, Courting Gravel)

     by Doless Graveheart

“Shameful!” That’s what the Reeve said. And the Postilion. No quarter given. “We are vanquished till the ghost of the Comptons is avenged to the last man jack of us.” So saying, he lit his pipe, sucking and dragging at it with intensity and vigor and, regarding the linoleum with fierce eyes, then flung it fuming into the garbage can. From which his secretary, smiling to herself, immediately retrieved it, billowing smoke, and handed it back to him who retook it as if he’d already forgotten the incident. All this fulminating had now and always over the years in the town hall in part to do with our (that is, the Sniggles’) family. We just could not be brought into line with the customs of the times. As you can tell, the narrative upshot so far, in the first paragraph of this piece, is that men in it are insolent, indolent and uncalm, while women (represented by one individual so far) remain reliablly placid and implacably competent. 

     We must recall the temper, that is, the relative elasticity, of most fiction when it creates characters. It quickly chooses the stock female fainting one and the male hero of steady emotion and strong will. But let us not, reader of this tale (and so many other readers too), be tempted by such logic. The real is not predictable nor is it attractive in any way. As we know, outside of the world of stories, women faint and fall at times, but men do so, too, and men admire the gift of insight more than they have it. So, get on the back of the real, pick up your paddle, and turn your skiff into flows you have no power to contain or direct.

     Travel to foreign countries was prohibited by the Sniggles’ father, our father, who thought that the only real journey a person ever needed venture on was the one into the skies when the soul left the body. He proved his practice of this to us by staying home all his life without leaving his six acres for any reason whatsoever during his seventy-two year tenure of the premises. He’d call to a passing neighbour when he wanted some grocery from town. He’d  hallow to the buckboard passing by to bring twelve gauge shells, he’d pay him well. Roustabout though he was, he was also adorable.  He made clothes pins out of willow for the Sniggles’ mothers and knitted socks for himself when they became too irate at his isolation to any longer indulge him, even in these most domestic of requests and necessities. He sang us to sleep evenings from his tick in the yard. Wherever we lay, we’d hear his gentle tenor voice comforting us to sleep. 

     Father hated the thought of travel because it was a thought, not because of any physical discomfort in travel. He disliked thought itself and said so now and then. We lived sixteen miles from Wainwright near Kaleida, in the western part of the province on the escarpment, near Crystal city and Mather and villages such as Clearwater, Snowflake and Fallison. Deer grazed with the cattle in the pasture. Split, dry oak heated the house. A fiddle and a guitar hung in the parlour and sometimes stroked the night. Pride ruled us and still does. We Sniggles would never give in.

     If she ever spoke I don’t recall it. My sister Sally silently made her way through this world, clad in her own silence, unafraid of her own unspokenness, I think, when I think of it at all, and able to speak with precision, nevertheless. 

     “Go to father and ask him for the loan of a needle for this darning,” her eyes would tell me in so many words and I would go do it and always she’d thank me profusely with veiled looks and movements of her fingers. She wore dresses upon that silly frame of hers. Dresses of a blousy, summery sort, filmy but modest nevertheless. She had no libido, so if you think I was going there you are wrong. She might have been a nun for all her interest in men. Animals were another matter. Often I came into the barn to find her affectionate with cow or calf, or even chickens. She liked geese for their long necks and chickens for their bobbing, red, leathery tops, she said. She petted and made much of them and it was a sight to see her hugging King, the Percheron. 

     “This one is a male,” she would announce about a gosling and I couldn’t have told one way or another if I was paid, though to please her I tried and she shook her head and giggled. That giggling was the only sound I ever heard her mouth make, except for crying once or twice. Nevertheless, she did love animals above all things, and so men who found her pretty might as well have courted gravel for all the headway they made. She lived on the farm all my growing up years and never once left it to go to town. She, too, like father, sent for necessaries and paid handsomely for them. 

     Six boys, seven girls made up the entire set of Sniggles siblings. Mothers we had two. The first was the most liked, the second the most loved. The first cooked the best soups, and the second, who still lives in the farmhouse but from whom I am estranged, continually prepared curry of such a pungency that father and the rest of us rarely entered the house at all except to eat and then get out the moment we’d finished and to our respective work or play. 

      We took, early in the tenure of our second mother, to sleeping anywhere but in the bedrooms of the house. Sally chose the icehouse, and kept quilts in it year round, even when the thermometer made the rest of us walk around wearing just enough clothing to not seem improper. Wiener-Eldon, the youngest, figured out that a hammock tied high in a cottonwood would keep others from hearing his snores and that’s where he stayed for many years at night, even after the accident. He now lives in Minneapolis and works for a high-rise company of some sort. Wango (his nickname only) slept near the pond within the perimeter of willows in order, he claimed, for the braibling of frogs to lull him to sleep. He rolled into the water one night, about which he will not speak except to Sally, who insists that she knows the whole story. Try as I might, she will not divulge it (even to write it on paper) and giggles instead until I leave off in exasperation. 

     All the rest also slept about the farmyard, some under machinery, one in a hole dug near the back fence close to the Wellbuilt-family side of our property. The Wellbuilts family is made up entirely of females, whose only male member had mysteriously disappeared many years ago. 

     Another, Ronnie Jr., made his bed in a car without wheels. Three boys and Linda chose the henhouse attic, father slept anywhere on the perimeter of the yard where he could lay his tick flat without any part of it on sloping ground, and the rest wherever. I learned to sleep sitting up, leaning on a wall, often on the blind side of the cow barn. 

     We all grew up grateful for what we had and now get together at the farm a few times a year to relive the past. This year I’m partially responsible for meals at our annual family picnic. For me, these get togethers cause a fair degree of anxiety and have ever since the accident. How do you make Jamaican jerk, does anybody know? I can’t locate a good recipe. Meat rubbed with it must be smoked with hickory, and the sauce itself must contain a generous quantity of Scotch Bonnet peppers and allspice berries, that much I do recall.

     

When Donne Made Him Do That

 

[initially written in about 2000 and reworked for public consumption in February, 2022]

When Donne Made Him Do That

     by Do Uglasreimer

Catherine Barkley wisely became Fredrick Henry’s “babe” in the red room in Vienna, though she felt “whorish” at the start when he proposed the red room, and when she was done with the difficult phases of entry into the room and the phase of getting into his “red room” spirit of adventure, she found she liked it. It was not easy to be vulnerable, but it was good. Will is pleasure. 

     Fredrick Henry thought about this as he wrote the section concerning Count Greffi. He and Count had shot pool. They had drunk drinks. They had discussed God. Then they’d parted forever, since Greffi was already ninety and getting on. Next, he and Cat found out in fear that Italians were investigating him and they would have to escape, immediately. They did that, after obtaining a skiff from a gentlemanly servant for a small sum. Rowing, they arrived in Switzerland, they rented a mountain Villa, they skied and they loved. Then, within a few weeks, the baby came due and Cat entered the hospital. There, waiting, he ate alone, across the street from the hospital, he prayed with fervency, he called on God to save her, she took much pain relief, and then she died. Outside, when he heard of it, it was raining. He walked home alone in the rain.

     He walked home alone in the rain. He walked like a statue walking, not looking right or left, unnerved, aimless, sightless, will-less, waifish. He walked, he ate little, he neither placed a hand in a pocket, nor scratched an itch on his nose. When traffic honked, he stopped. The twittering of a meadowlark told him suddenly that he had reached the outskirts of the city and gone beyond, he saw, into a hayfield. Still he trudged until he came, by hook or by crook, to his old apartment on Seventh Avenue.

      The circuity of the route he took recommended itself to him many times in the following months as he prepared to write about the living woman he had loved. He ignored all metaphors, however, because he was of fresh mind. His mind had no comparisons in it. No similes rang there to show a way out of the maze. Images suggested themselves to him now and then but, ignored, soon faded and disappear like type on a page of burning newsprint . 

     Once, when tempted by a set of words that, to one degree or another, smelt of and had been dirtied by counterfeitance, he listed them, contemplated using them, rejected their use, and suddenly flung them out the window. Now and then, though, he did employ a phrase from some book he recalled. Thus, Donne, Jonson, Schoppenhauer, Flagstaff, Milton, Dryden, Locke, Churchill, Flintstone, Wrigley, Chaucer, Wittgenstein, Niebuhr, Dante, Snellhemp and Wangly found their way into his prose, though usually only obliquely. Referential he was no more than he was deferential. 

     All this while, as he wrote these memories of Catherine B, he thought about the red room. Somehow that was, if any, the moment that the book needed to present perfectly. He did it then by negatively showing her as reluctant, almost petulant at first, seeing the redness of their one-night room. Then, abruptly, he showed her artificially happy, announcing (that is, Cat announcing) that she had been crazy, but now she was OK. Next, he had them make love off stage. Afterwards (that is, after their red room initimacy), he had Catherine proclaiming that love was a fine thing. (The entire time, without cessation, during the writing of all this—remember, at this time Cat Bark is dead—he, Fredrick Henry, you must understand, writhed in a state of immeasurable loss and longing, in the grips of the radiation sickness of not ever seeing her again.) That she wished she could stay in this room forever. He showed her enjoying being loose, “sluttish,” playfully pliant to love. She was married to him, after all, not officially, but as corporations are often quietly married when they merge. 

     When she died she was, like that same now-merged corporation, disintegrated. A disintegrated corporation. How he disliked this fact. It was like Milton realizing that Christ was not a military hero. It took Milton thirty years to come to terms with that fact. He was inwardly driven during those thirty years to write Christ as the axer of Satan, as the blaster of beelzebub, as the iron fist of justice on Sin. But he did not. He did not do that and lived. His epic came as a result of making Jesus not a merged corporation, but a disintegrated one, one that knew the ins and outs of gain and loss and, now utterly lost, knew about utter loss, too, so that He/it could begin to see, and so end in the seeing that saves.

     She had saved Fredrick, had Cat. Bark. Saved, he was not saved until he thought. Saved, he was lost until he thought for himself. Thinking for himself, he was not found but still lost, and being still lost he had no ground to stand on. The only thing between him and himself was his remembering what had happened and celebrating it. He remembered her then, in his war story, which is a story six months gone with child. Soldiers in his story are givers-birth-to of babies. Soldiers, trees, rivers, lakes, leaves, and surgeons give birth in this story. They are all giving birth as Cat. Bark. gave birth before she died. He died when she lived in those last days. He died to himself when she died into a living through him that he would not ever understand but be able to describe in a book better than those rest of us who might have the events but not the thought to make pleasure out of those same events. He did, then, not knowing, but feeling her alive in him (though dead in the world), make this story about the disintegration that became, or that already was, the end of the death that Death died when Donne made him do that.

Me and My Father

 Me and My Father 
     by Dead-eye Doug

Poor dad. That’s not how it should have been. Not how it should have happened. That is not how he should have died. I thought this while leaning on the green cement wall of the one-cubicle toilet in the college where I work. The smooth cement cooled my hand. I thought about germs, and then my stomach dropped with the weight of the new thought.
     I’d smelled breakfast earlier in my office on the third floor coming from the fresh-air ducts. I hesitated, and then walked down to the basement level to get some. I figured, “What the heck, I can go for breakfast once in a while out here and not just always get straight to work. It’s right downstairs. And it’s only a few bucks.” I had spent a hundred bucks the night before on my wife and kids. Their birthdays. Two of them. November third and fifth. That thought made me pause. “No, maybe I shouldn’t. Oh, why not.” So I went.
     I rang the bell that keeps strangers out of the residence kitchen. The sign on the door said, “Under no circumstances should you jam something between the doors to keep them open. Students who are caught doing so may be required to leave residence.” I buzzed. At first no one came. Then a young, black, student-type opened up the door and I walked in. Ian, the cook, a new cook in Saint John’s, called out when he saw me. 
     “I’ve got a waffle going right now. It’ll be a few minutes. Pour yourself a cup of coffee and relax. I’ll tell you when it’s ready.” I’d talked to Ian only once before, on the stairway. He said, “Hi, “and I said, “Hi. You’re Ian, right?” We’d hardly slowed, speaking.
      I waited in the room off the kitchen, a long narrow room wide enough for only a row of round tables along the wall and a walkway. It held half a dozen tables, most of them empty. Two young women approached one and sat down facing me. They ate in silence. Farther behind them, a few students got up and brought their trays of dishes to the stand and, talking, walked out. A lanky island girl left next, straight-backed, in dark brown and in Spice Girls shoes. An island boy, bigger, chubbier, followed her a few seconds later. I saw him switch from walking to running just as he passed the open door through which I looked. Ian called me and I picked up my plate.
     “We’ve got some sausages and bacon, too,”
he said. His face glowed from kitchen heat and talk.
     “Maybe two sausages and two strips of bacon,” I said, pointing into the stainless containers with a few dozen of each in them. He lifted them out with tongs and laid them out across the waffle, a fat waffle with some butter and syrup on it. 
      “Enjoy,” he said. He turned back to the black guy with a few words, laughing as he did. After I found my seat, I heard them speaking to a third-party, someone I couldn’t see but who’s mop swished past the open door. They invited the person mopping to eat something.
     “You really need to have some breakfast,” I heard Ian say, though I couldn’t see him from where I sat in the dining room. 
     “We’ve got some bacon, waffles, sausages and some other things,” the young black added. The mopper remained reluctant. I heard his mop flishing along the wall. 
     I ate, in a hurry, brought my place back, stopped in the staff washroom at the urinal and thought of my dad. He should not have been on morphine at the end, I thought. He should not have been on such a high dose of morphine. He should have died at home. 
     Father murmured and suddenly smiled when I said, “I think you want me to say that I love Jesus before you die.” I had not seen him smile or respond in any way in the last week. Not since I’d arrived in Abbotsford from Winnipeg. 
      “Aaaahhhhh,” he said without turning his head or eyes. No words came. He spoke not a word that whole week I spent with him. I spent all day always just sitting near him or lying on his bed beside him, sometimes with my arms around him. The nurse had mentioned earlier that he heard everything so we should be careful what we said.
     After he said, “Aaaaahhhhh,” like that, my brother and I, across the bed from each other, put our arms around him, each with one arm under his head, his thin gray hair so soft and neck so warm, and he looked up with those very bright blue eyes of his—not at us, at Heaven—and died. We heard the breaths ending. Three or four breaths came and then they stopped. At first we disbelieved it. He couldn’t die just now after he answered us with his “Aaaaahhhhh.” It seemed unlikely. But he did. And we held him, shocked. Then we began to cry. In a few minutes mother and Nancy, Rudi‘s wife, returning from parking the car, came in and saw us there, holding father and crying.

Meditation With Dad

[Written the last week of January, 2022]

 Meditation With Dad      

by Leaky Leigh the Busy Bee

So we’d take our regular route to Steinbach from Altona. From there the #1 led us to Hadashville where we’d turn onto another highway that took us through Whitemouth and Rennie and finally to Jessica Lake where we’d stop. Mr. Scharf ran the tourist camp here. We’d find him in the small grocery store where we’d buy pork-n-beans, weiners, hotdog buns and maybe even marshmallows. Dad would add a Pepsi for each of us and, if our luck held, an Old Henry chocolate bar. In my experience fathers just bought such things without inquiring about preferences.
     Then there’d be the boat to rent. Always a heavy wooden thing that needed four mature men to carry it. Off we’d set for Lake Meditation. We’d drive very slowly once we left the sandy section, a smooth two-track trail that curved this way and that. It rose and fell under us like the gentle swells of the ocean long after a storm. Ah, but now came the next leg, three quarters of a mile of broken granite, uneven and rough (really only a sort-of trail marked by the absence of trees and scratches where car bottoms had struck rocks and ledges) that threatened to disembowel the ‘56 Mercury. Slowly, with our hearts noticeably beating now, the car, with the five of us in it, inched over a veritable obstacle course till it finally stopped above the final stretch of the trail that led down to Lake Meditation.                              Once or twice, despite all father’s best efforts, there’d be the inevitable bang of the differential smacking a rock. Oh! No! We quietly feared, and father actually spoke aloud, the possibility that the oil pan might have been cracked and oil would leak out on the rocks below the car. On each trip we always anticipated the spilled oil and the disabled car and a four mile hike to the main highway to hitchhike to Skarf’s for help, but it never happened. We always lucked out! 
     The boat now had to be unloaded (from the top of the car? From a trailer? I don’t remember for sure). Then, sudden joy racing through us—even through father, I think—we would each take hold of the gunnel at a different place and begin what we all knew to be a half mile portage from hell, muscles straining, mosquitoes landed by the thousands on our faces and hands, and no one able to slap at them because of carrying the boat.
     It weighed two hundred pounds dry. The first leg of this portage sloped in a friendly fashion downward for approximately three or four hundred yards at a rate that always managed, in the years that I used it, to distract me from the trials ahead. At the end of this gentle part began the ungentle. Ah, yes! the infamous swamp! Many decades before, during some lengthy and unlikely dry spell (maybe “the dirty thirties”) when the swamp presented no trouble because not wet enough, someone had built a hundred yards of courderoy road that, given the right conditions, served as a reliable passage through the worst of the swamp. 
     But not in these years that we crossed over it. Now a shallow lake, swarming with bloodsuckers, filled with slimy weeds and  mosquitoes, made up this area. I said shallow, but not shallow enough. With water up to our knees, feet sinking into muck, unseen logs floating near bottom, others bobbing up around our knees, logs that were more obstructions than anything, unstable, slimy, shooting sideways under our feet, we somehow slogged through till solid ground eventually gave us a rest. But not rest for long. Once again we’d rustle ourselves up and face one and a half million mosquitoes. But here, after the hellish swamp, it was all easygoing path, right up to the lake. Next, we all got into the boat and crossed Lake Meditation, father’s two horse Evinrude crawling straight across its middle   
     Once on the other side and on the portage to Horseshoe Lake, the real work began because here we had to work this boat up a steep incline and over a rock-strewn pass and then down a decline so precipitous it felt at each step as if no footing could ever be found, just some more sliding on stones and gravel. But we’d make it. We always made it. As we came around the last bend, a majestic sight greeted us.  To the right, a cliff a hundred feet tall, a small bay directly in front and to the left, the very tip of the start of the five mile horseshoe that made the lake. And jacks. Lots and lots of jackfish. To put the sugar in the tea, high up on the cliff for all the lowly world to see, an eagle’s nest with young ones in it. We set up the tent, collected some firewood in case it rained at night, and then quickly got in the boat for an hour’s worth of fishing before bed. . 

What’s Wanted

 [Written in about 2003]

What’s Wanted

     D. O. (of the Nameless Nannies)

“People are hungry for characters,” my sister informs me in the restaurant as we sit down in the corner booth at the Marion Street McDonald’s. The waitress behind the counter has just barked at us, implying who knows what, like maybe that I should have ordered at least the Sausage and Egg McMuffin meal instead of just Egg McMuffin with nothing else. The waitress, who is fifty or so, informs us (my sister having initiated the conversation by asking her a question or commenting to her about something) when she delivers a few packages of hashbrowns to the next table a few minutes later, that this is her last day here. She’s quitting after thirteen years. 

     My sister exchanges pleasantries with her.

“It’s hard leaving a place isn’t it,” my sister says in a loud voice. The waitress agrees. “She is hurt today. That’s why she’s so loud,” my sister informs me in quite a loud voice herself when the waitress leaves. “She doesn’t mind being loud and hurt and making people feel uncomfortable. The world needs characters,” my sister says again. “We are hungry for oddity.”

     Is the world hungry for blind characters? People don’t like blind people. Not even if they are characters. Especially if they are characters. A blind character wouldn’t get the time of day from anyone. He’d be immediately forgotten, if not ignored from the start. People don’t tolerate blind people. It makes no difference if they are characters.

     Or short people. Even if you have a short person who is a character. Let’s say he’s three foot four and wears the most gaudy ties and vibrantly-coloured, expensive, leather shoes, red one day, green the next. Say he leaps up in class and shouts questions of a provocative and intelligent sort at the professor who is shy and not outstanding in any way at all. Who will care? Who will be his friend? Will the girl in the front, the very pretty one who wears those tight earth-toned sweaters and who has those twinkling eyes the colour off blue slate, take notice of him? Will she turn around, make eye contact, and after class arrange to meet him for coffee to see what sort of guy he is? No, she won’t. Of course not. She is not interested in characters. Especially not short ones.

Sight

 Sight

     by D. O. R. E. Imer

In northern Manitoba, a hundred miles from the nearest road or habitat, an indigenous man sat in the snow with his back against a tree. He sat so still for so long that animals in the forest began to wonder and grow bold. This is a trick, they thought, and watched carefully. First, close to the bend in the path far from the human, a fly buzzed across the trail in full view. The other animals bated their breaths. Nothing. The indigene batted not an eye or moved a muscle. 
     “Ah, he couldn’t see him,” nodded the owl, peering at different animals with a smooth turn of the neck. Next, a weasel, brave for his size, and quick as quick can be, snuck to the edge of the path, paused, and then scurried across. And even then no sign from the still form. All the animals began to feel ease and courage. Closer to the resting man now, a rabbit hipped over the trail, then a snake slithered right by the human with his eyes fixed on his face. Then, in quick succession, a wolf loped, a fox crept, a bull shimmied, a moose meandered and a spruce hen fluttered across. Not a hair stirred on the man’s head, nor an eye blinked. 
     “Let’s do something crazy,”Toad croaked, his smile ear to ear. They all nodded together wisely, then they snickered, laughed, whinnied, hooted, howled and crowed in glee and pleasure at the thought of engaging in something fun together. 

The Lonesome Hobo Song

[Written in 2012]

The Lonesome Hobo Song

     by Luckless Lame Ronny Leimer 

1

Ma’am, don’t loan me any money

Sir, don’t give me any cash

Don’t reach deep into your pockets,

Cause you’ll never get it back.

I’m a hobo I am a stranger

With this stick and with this sack

I’ve walked this road a thousand miles

And I won’t be coming back

Lord, I’ve walked this road a thousand miles 

And I won’t be coming back.

Chorus 

I am a lonesome hobo

The road’s my only friend

I’ve walked it for a thousand miles

And I’ll walk it once again

If you’ll spare a cup of coffee,

Then I’ll be on my way

I thank you ma’am

You are too kind

I tip my hat and say

That I am just a lonesome hobo

Now I’ll get out of your way

2

Don’t pass me any handouts

Forget the golden rule

Don’t feed me bread and chicken

It’s just wasted on this fool

When I was still a young boy

I wondered what I’d do

But I realized it was useless

Money’s for the lucky few

Lord I realized it was useless

Money’s for the lucky few 

Chorus 

I am a lonesome hobo

The road’s my only friend

I’ve walked it for a thousand miles

And I’ll walk it once again

If you’ll spare a cup of coffee,

Then I’ll be on my way

I thank you ma’am

You are too kind

I tip my hat and say

That I am just a lonesome hobo

Now I’ll get out of your way

3

This road I’m on is it lonely

I wonder where it goes

I’m nearly always hungry

And I’m cold from head to toe

Though it’s hard to make my living ma’am

Don’t worry about my state

Each morning finds me still alive

Knocking at some gate

See, each morning finds me still alive

Here I’m knocking at your gate

Chorus 

I am a lonesome hobo

The road’s my only friend

I’ve walked it for a thousand miles

And I’ll walk it once again

If you’ll spare a cup of coffee,

Then I’ll be on my way

I thank you ma’am

You are too kind

I tip my hat and say

That I am just a lonesome hobo

Now I’ll get out of your way