Throughout this collection, we see profound wonder, questioning, and conflicts involving family, sexual identity, class, discrimination, environmental beauty, and peril, and all the sorts of rebellion, error, contemplation, and contentment that an intrepid soul can devise. These stories and poems, all published within the last fifteen years, are grounded in what it means to live in and identify with a complex place.
With a mix of established writers like Jayne Anne Phillips, Norman Jordan, Ann Pancake, Maggie Anderson, and Denise Giardina and fresh voices like Matthew Neill Null, Ida Stewart, Rajia Hassib, and Scott McClanahan, this collection breaks open new visions of all-American landscapes of the heart. By turns rowdy and contemplative, hilarious and bleak, and lyrical and gritty, it is a collage of extraordinary literary visions.
Throughout this collection, we see profound wonder, questioning, and conflicts involving family, sexual identity, class, discrimination, environmental beauty, and peril, and all the sorts of rebellion, error, contemplation, and contentment that an intrepid soul can devise. These stories and poems, all published within the last fifteen years, are grounded in what it means to live in and identify with a complex place.
With a mix of established writers like Jayne Anne Phillips, Norman Jordan, Ann Pancake, Maggie Anderson, and Denise Giardina and fresh voices like Matthew Neill Null, Ida Stewart, Rajia Hassib, and Scott McClanahan, this collection breaks open new visions of all-American landscapes of the heart. By turns rowdy and contemplative, hilarious and bleak, and lyrical and gritty, it is a collage of extraordinary literary visions.
Eyes Glowing at the Edge of the Woods: Fiction and Poetry from West Virginia
335
Eyes Glowing at the Edge of the Woods: Fiction and Poetry from West Virginia
335eBook
Available on Compatible NOOK devices, the free NOOK App and in My Digital Library.
Related collections and offers
Overview
Throughout this collection, we see profound wonder, questioning, and conflicts involving family, sexual identity, class, discrimination, environmental beauty, and peril, and all the sorts of rebellion, error, contemplation, and contentment that an intrepid soul can devise. These stories and poems, all published within the last fifteen years, are grounded in what it means to live in and identify with a complex place.
With a mix of established writers like Jayne Anne Phillips, Norman Jordan, Ann Pancake, Maggie Anderson, and Denise Giardina and fresh voices like Matthew Neill Null, Ida Stewart, Rajia Hassib, and Scott McClanahan, this collection breaks open new visions of all-American landscapes of the heart. By turns rowdy and contemplative, hilarious and bleak, and lyrical and gritty, it is a collage of extraordinary literary visions.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781943665556 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | West Virginia University Press |
| Publication date: | 03/01/2017 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 335 |
| File size: | 928 KB |
About the Author
Doug Van Gundy’s poems, essays, and reviews have appeared in the Oxford American, Ecotone, Appalachian Heritage, Poetry Salzburg Review, and elsewhere. He is the author of the poetry collection A Life Above Water, and he teaches writing at West Virginia Wesleyan College.
Read an Excerpt
Eyes Glowing at the Edge of the Woods
Fiction and Poetry from West Virginia
By Laura Long Doug, Van Gundy
West Virginia University Press
Copyright © 2017 West Virginia University PressAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-943665-55-6
CHAPTER 1
Gail Galloway Adams
OLIVES
* * *
In the supermarket where I shop there is a new feature: at the end of the deli counter, where ham haunches wait to be sliced and cheeses and breads are heaped as in a European market, is a counter made to look like a surrey cart. Under its fringe are galvanized buckets filled with false grapes and plastic bins the size of troughs; most of these bins are filled with olives. The ones on the end present mixes of peppers and onions and mushrooms, but the inner containers hold olives only. How beautiful they are! So glossy they hardly look real.
I bought two tubs of them; so many they'll probably never be eaten, but I put them on a plate and admired their differences: the plump, slick, khaki ones, the eggplant-dark that look like small prune plums or deepest bruises, and the strange, shriveled ones, the cadavers of the olive world. They look like mummies' eyes and their taste is oily and musky at once.
I bought so many because olives are what must be bought when I want to remember my mother; when I want to ask myself what I am doing with my life; when I want to be thankful that I was born in America.
My mother was born into a poor family in the village of Aelintakos on the edge of Greece that borders Turkey, a paring of land so poor that the earth is bleached as white as the sky; yet even now, battles rage over who will own it.
"It seems," my mother once said, "that when the sun fled to rest, the earth became its rightful color — the red of blood." So I buy olives to remember all those lives lost to strife and hardship and the wearing away that a hard life brings. Aelintakos was a poor village and it was not redeemed by kindness. Poverty rarely ennobles or enriches the spirit of man.
"Only those who have a soul can feel it move for the pity of life." That too was something my mother said.
Sometimes as I lick the olive's thick matte skin or sip the brine that puddles in the bottom of a dish, I imagine I hear my mother's voice in a slow murmur behind the door. She prayed every night and there was not only a click of beads, but a strange thump and then a soft thud that I later learned was the beat of her fist at her breastbone, the lowering of her head against the floor.
From my mother I learned that olives were life, to be eaten every day; to eat the fruit and the oil and with them the staff, which was bread, baked each morning, a flat round the size of a wheel, a rude cross cut into its face. And, also necessary, coarse salt, and water carried from the town's well, which sat squat in the center of the square, its circle of chipped blue and white tiles glistening; its cool slosh a promise of some deep, unquenchable freshet beneath the parched earth that would provide as the heavens did not.
The olives arrayed on the majolica plate seem to me like the girls of that village. My mother told me their names: hers Melaina, her best friend Irina, her sister Zoe. Daphne, Cleota, Olympia; these are the names of maidens in myths, nymphs or mortals stolen away from their homes by the gods. Ariadne and Danae, Elektra and Chloe. In this fruit's progress I see the girls of Aelintakos as they emerge into first womanhood: thick fuzzy braids tied with twine, a perfect line of brow above dark eyes filled with life. I see them wear down until in their forties they are kerchiefed crones, like a Greek chorus. They are the tragedy's keening; they are the harpies shrieking; they are the dark and shriveled flesh I lift to my lips.
"Dark bitterness — it's delicious," my mother said of these wrinkled olives that she most loved. And it's true. This taste is the essence of years: salt and lime, earth and must, and at its core the hardness that will break into flower.
Beyond the hills of that village, olive groves appear in the dusk as one great tangle; and when I dream of Aelintakos in the nights when my mother is still alive to me, there is a stand of women arrayed against the rise. What an odd gate it makes, those pickets in black. But against that parched white earth, those dark green vines, these dreamed black sentries are my link to memory, and my link to all those other lives when mortal women spurned Elysian lovers and were thus transformed: spider, laurel, willow, olive, echo echo echo.
Maggie Anderson
AND THEN I ARRIVE AT THE POWERFUL GREEN HILL
* * *
Up, up, I follow
the creek bed through downed branches
on spongy leaves, rimed and slippery.
The way is clear because
it is late winter,
wet snow patches
the runoff cold, cold to the touch
a tang of ice still in it.
And then I arrive at the powerful green hill,
my place, my exact location,
where I began and started from
where I will end beneath this ground.
I have brought everything I've left undone —
letters and resolutions, almost loves,
hard grudges — to give to the wind that takes them up,
tosses them down, down until
my hands are empty and I am as thin and light as a girl.
A BLESSING
* * *
Inside the mind there is a balm
I know it and I say hello.
— Irene McKinney
Translucent braid gelled to silver at first light,
the valley's work, the white, the shining.
An entrenched meander cuts sharp
shoals into the narrow sluice
of the gorge. Clouds like ether rise
from the sandstone up the sheer, simple
mountains, dark-graded with pine.
I come to this water
for the rustle and hiss at the falls,
for the fast train sound when
the traps of the dam open up downriver.
I come for the limestone outcroppings —
the blue stone — and the shift
of the midwinter sandbars after
a summer of drought. I come for
the silence of amber, the flicker
of brook trout over the rapids,
to the soft banks of sand
where the stiff-necked sumac release
and fall over into what's left of the river
at the end of the dry branch.
Pinckney Benedict
MERCY
* * *
The livestock hauler's ramp banged onto the ground, and out of the darkness they came, the miniature horses, fine-boned and fragile as china. They trit- trotted down the incline like the vanguard of a circus parade, tails up, manes fluttering. They were mostly a bunch of tiny pintos, the biggest not even three feet tall at the withers. I was ten years old, and their little bodies made me feel like a giant. The horses kept coming out of the trailer, more and more of them every moment. The teamsters that were unloading them just stood back and smiled.
My old man and I were leaning on the top wire of the southern fence-line of our place, watching the neighbor farm become home to these exotics. Ponies, he kept saying, ponies ponies ponies, like if he said it enough times, he might be able to make them go away. Or make himself believe they were real, one or the other.
I think they're miniature horses, I told him. Not ponies. I kept my voice low, not sure I wanted him to hear me.
One faultless dog-sized sorrel mare looked right at me, tossed its head, and sauntered out into the thick clover of the field, nostrils flaring. I decided I liked that one the best. To myself, I named it Cinnamon. If I were to try and ride it, I thought, my heels would drag the ground.
Horses, ponies, my old man said. He had heard. He swept out a dismissive hand. Can't work them, can't ride them, can't eat them. Useless.
Useless was the worst insult in his vocabulary.
We were angus farmers. Magnificent deep-fleshed black angus. In the field behind us, a dozen of our market steers roamed past my old man and me in a lopsided wedge, cropping the sweet grass. They ate constantly, putting on a pound, two pounds a day. All together like that, they made a sound like a steam locomotive at rest in the station, a deep resonant sighing. Their rough hides gleamed obsidian in the afternoon sun, and their hooves might have been fashioned out of pig iron.
The biggest of them, the point of the wedge, raised his head, working to suss out this new smell, the source of this nickering and whinnying, that had invaded his neighborhood. His name was Rug, because his hide was perfect, and my old man planned to have it tanned after we sent him off to the lockers in the fall. None of the other steers had names, just the numbers in the yellow tags that dangled from their ears. Rug peered near-sightedly through the woven-wire fence that marked the border between his field and the miniature horses', and his face was impassive, as it always was.
The teamsters slammed the trailer's ramp back into place and climbed into the rig's cab, cranked up the big diesel engine, oily smoke pluming from the dual stacks. The offloaded horses began to play together, nipping at one another with their long yellow teeth, dashing around the periphery of the field, finding the limits of the place. Cinnamon trailed after the others, less playful than the rest. Rug lowered his head and moved on, and the wedge of heavy- shouldered angus moved with him.
Another livestock van pulled into the field, the drivers of the two trucks exchanging casual nods as they passed each other. I was happy enough to see more of them come, funny little beggars, but I had a moment of wondering to myself how many horses, even miniature ones, the pasture could sustain.
More of the midgets, my old man said. What in hell's next? he asked. He wasn't speaking to me exactly. He very seldom addressed a question directly to me. It seemed like he might be asking God Himself. What? Giraffes? Crocodiles?
* * *
This valley was a beef valley from long before I was born. A broad river valley with good grass, set like a diamond in the center of a wide plateau at twenty-four hundred feet of altitude. For generations it was Herefords all around our place, mostly, and Charolais, but our angus were the sovereigns over them all. My grandfather was president of the cattlemen's association, and he raised some trouble when the Beefmasters and Swiss Simmentals came in, because the breeds were unfamiliar to him; and my old man did the same when the place to our east went with the weird-looking hump-backed lop-eared Brahmas. But they got used to the new breeds. They were, after all, beefers, and beef fed the nation; and we were still royalty.
Then the bottom fell out of beef prices. We hung on. Around us, the Charolais and Simmentals went first, the herds dispersed and the land sold over the course of a few years, and then the rest of them all in a rush, and we were alone. Worse than alone. Now it was swine to the east, and the smell of them when the wind was wrong was enough to gag a strong-stomached man. The smell of angus manure is thick and honest and bland, like the angus himself; but pig manure is acid and briny and bitter and brings a tear to the eye. And the shrieking of the pigs clustered in their long barns at night, as it drifted across the fields into our windows, was like the cries of the damned.
Pigs to the east, with a big poultry operation beyond that, and sheep to the north (with llamas to protect them from packs of feral dogs), and even rumors of a man up in Pocahontas County who wanted to start an ostrich ranch, because ostrich meat was said to be low in fat and cholesterol, and ostrich plumes made wonderful feather dusters that never wore out.
The place to our west wasn't even a farm anymore. A rich surgeon named Slaughter from the county seat had bought the acreage when Warren Kennebaker, the Charolais breeder, went bust. Slaughter had designed it like a fortress, and it looked down on our frame house from a hill where the dignified long-bodied Charolais had grazed: a great gabled many-chimneyed mansion that went up in a matter of months; acres of slate roof and a decorative entrance flanked by stone pillars and spear-pointed pickets that ran for three or four rods out to each side of the driveway and ended there; and gates with rampant lions picked out in gold. That entrance with its partial fence made my old man angrier than anything else. What good's a fence that doesn't go all the way around? he asked me. Keeps nothing out, keeps nothing in.
Useless, I said.
As tits on a bull, he said. Then: Doctor Slaughter, Doctor Slaughter! he shouted up at the blank windows of the house. He thought her name was the funniest thing he had ever heard. Why don't you just get together and form a practice with Doctor Payne and Doctor Butcher?
There was no Doctor Payne or Doctor Butcher; that was just his joke.
Payne, Slaughter, and Butcher! he shouted. That would be rich.
* * *
The horses started testing the fence almost from the first. They were smart, I could tell that from watching them, from the way they played tag together, darting off to the far parts of the pasture to hide, flirting, concealing their compact bodies in folds of the earth and leaping up to race off again when they were discovered, their hooves drumming against the hard-packed ground. They galloped until they reached one end of the long field, then swung around in a broad curve and came hell-for-leather back the way they had gone, their coats shaggy with the approach of winter and slick with sweat. I watched them whenever I had a few moments free from ferrying feed for the steers.
I would walk down to the south fence and climb up on the sagging wire and sit and take them in as they leaped and nipped and pawed at one another with their sharp, narrow hooves. I felt like they wanted to put on a show for me when I was there, wanted to entertain me. During the first snow, which was early that year, at the end of October, they stood stock still, the whole crew of them, and gaped around at the gently falling flakes. They twitched their hides and shook their manes and shoulders as though flies were lighting all over them. They snorted and bared their teeth and sneezed. After a while, they grew bored with the snow and went back to their games.
After a few weeks, though, when the weather got colder and the grass was thin and trampled down, the horses became less like kids and more like the convicts in some prison picture: heads down, shoulders hunched, they sidled along the fence line, casting furtive glances at me and at the comparatively lush pasturage on our side of the barrier.
The fence was a shame and an eyesore. It had been a dry summer when it went in five years before, when the last of the dwindling Herefords had occupied the field, and the dirt that season was dry as desert sand, and the posts weren't sunk as deep as they should have been.
They were loose like bad teeth, and a few of them were nearly rotted through. I was the only one who knew what bad shape it was getting to be in. My old man seldom came down to this boundary after the day the horses arrived, and nobody from the miniature horse farm walked their border the way we walked ours. We didn't know any of them, people from outside the county, hardly ever glimpsed them at all.
It wasn't our problem to solve. By long tradition, that stretch was the responsibility of the landowner to the south, and I figured my old man would die before he would take up labor and expense that properly belonged with the owners of the miniature horses.
* * *
Cinnamon, the sorrel, came over to me one afternoon when I was taking a break, pushed her soft nose through the fence toward me, and I promised myself that the next time I came I would bring the stump of a carrot or a lump of sugar with me. I petted her velvet nose and she nibbled gently at my fingers and the open palm of my hand. Her whiskers tickled and her breath was warm and damp against my skin.
Then she took her nose from me and clamped her front teeth on the thin steel wire of the fence and pulled it toward her, pushed it back. I laughed. Get away from there, I told her, and smacked her gently on the muzzle. She looked at me reproachfully and tugged at the wire again. Her mouth made grating sounds against the metal that set my own teeth on edge. She had braced her front legs and was really pulling, and the fence flexed and twanged like a bow string. A staple popped loose from the nearest post.
You've got to stop it, I said. You don't want to come over here, even if the grass looks good. My old man will shoot you if you do.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Eyes Glowing at the Edge of the Woods by Laura Long Doug, Van Gundy. Copyright © 2017 West Virginia University Press. Excerpted by permission of West Virginia University Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.