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Conjugations of the Verb To Be: Stories

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Overview

A collection of stories that capture the natural and spiritual beauty of Montana from “the Alice Munro of our American West” (David Abrams, author of Fobbit).

In one of Glen Chamberlain’s magnetic new stories, “Off the Road; or, The Perfect Curve Unfound,” the narrator sets off from Seattle for Michigan, “once again making the decision to leave before being left.” At Three Forks, Montana, a flight of geese take her off the road, into the Crazy Mountains, into a place the Indians consider one of the centers of the world, where she finds her own center. Each of the stories in this irresistible collection inhabits a center of the world, a piece of Montana country that she makes uniquely her own, whether she is writing about rearing Arabian horses, or building the three-generation history of a family around the evolution of hay-stacking, or ice-skating with Kate Brethwaite, the formidable physics teacher at Buckle High School, as she makes her increasingly exhausting journey by way of ice from a community skating place to her locked and forbidding home. Whether the stories are about living, loving or dying they inhabit the essences of their actions and compel the reader to view fresh terrains of the author’s rich and original imagination.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781453220474
Publisher:	Delphinium Books, Incorporated
Publication date:	09/06/2011
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	NOOK Book
Pages:	208
File size:	582 KB

About the Author

Glen Chamberlain has won a Pushcart Prize, the first Gilcrease Prize for fiction, and the Rona Jaffe Award for both fiction and creative nonfiction. The Rona Jaffe Award named her “one of the six most promising women writers in the nation.” She lives with her husband in Bozeman, Montana, where she teaches writing at Montana State University.

Read an Excerpt

Conjugations of the Verb To Be

Short Stories

By Glen Chamberlain

DELPHINIUM BOOKS

CHAPTER 1

Amongst the Fields

Outside the locked room is the landscape of time ... —Ursula K. LeGuin, The Dispossessed

Infinity

Miss Brethwaite's Möbius strip loops above me. It is a long stretch of butcher paper, twisted once by my physics teacher and then connected at the ends. She hopes that we will be able to visualize infinity when we look at it.

I can't. This is because one side of the paper is waxed, the other not. I do not think infinity comes in shades of shiny and dull. Miss Brethwaite also joined the ends of the strip with big staples. I do not imagine infinity being held together by tin stitches. Nor would there be a world around it that pulses, as the long fluorescent lights in this classroom do. I know that stars pulse, and being partially made of stardust, I pulse, but I do not believe infinity would. Certainly such a thing is beyond that, beyond the stars and me.

Below the ceiling, the air made warm by the clanking hot-water heater swirls around the twisted paper, fluttering it. Hanging since Christmas, its sides have become as worn as the edges of the road my school bus travels every morning and afternoon. In the spring, when the fog thickens on the long curve that twists up and over Buckle Summit and the borrow ditches beckon just off the slippery tar, I think I am closer to infinity than Miss Brethwaite's Möbius strip will ever take me.

Perhaps my lack of understanding stems from my familiarity with butcher paper. At least once a year I twist and tape patches of it around the specific muscles of a dead animal. It happens in early summer when Daddy, with a bucket of grain, leads the steer, still pulsing in hide and hoof, out into the lower hay meadow. He puts the black pail down and walks away. The yearling, a little spooky, walks up to it and blows, and the grain flies out. He sniffs and snorts and soon commences to eat as Daddy walks farther and farther away. About the time the steer's done, Daddy has found a spot to sit. He rests his elbows on his knees, his rifle in his hands, and he wrinkles an eye into the crosshairs of his scope, shrinking distance. I stand far to the side of him, wondering if time shortens when space does, and when I see his trigger arm tense, I hold my breath.

The steer crumples at the same time there is a hollow pop. The Angus is no longer in a gentle summer day, enjoying a certain bucket of oats. Though he is lying amongst the green timothy and the wild iris of my little meadow, he has entered another field, as well. All that really remains of him here is tenderloin and T-bone and sirloin and roast.

I look away from the Möbius strip and down to my wrist, which calmly beats the rhythm of my life. I press my thumb to that pulse, wondering how long it will be till I abdicate to infinity, and I sigh, not because I'm contemplating my end, but because I am having trouble with this physics test.

Phillip Steen, the dentist's son, hears me and looks up from the white space he has filled with tight little figures. It is impressive, this precise order he makes out of nothing. He is in love with numbers and with me. He has asked me out too much. But there is something wrong with his eyeballs. All the time they jiggle and bounce like they're attached to miniature rubber bands springing from the inside of his skull. I have come to think they vibrate to his brainy calculation of the world and of me. When I talk to Phillip, I try not to look at his irises because they make my head and stomach ache. I smile quickly at him and glance back to my own page.

Miss Brethwaite has said that it helps to draw pictures, that they will clarify the formulae necessary to apprehend the world. The particular problem that has slowed me involves a boat and a current. Sensibly, I began my illustration with a canoe and a river. As I've studied the problem, shrubs have grown up along the banks, and then trees—whole climax forests of them—have sprouted, and there is long grass that curls like birthday-box ribbon into the water where cutthroat run upstream and cobblestones run together. At first empty, the boat now has two passengers—men—and one of them is paddling while the other sits and stares at the ripples I have placed. It is Henry David Thoreau taking his brother, John, on the Concord and Merrimack rivers for a week, just before John dies of lockjaw. I think Henry should slow the velocity of the boat by not paddling, or maybe he should even stroke against the current. In such ways he will stall the arrival at his brother's jumping-off place. I erase the paddle and redraw it. Now it is poised above the water, and Henry and John float—just float.

I draw a little bubble coming from John's mouth and in it write the only thought I know of Heraclitus: "You cannot step into the same river twice." Just so simply the currents carry time away, and we are left confused by the velocity of our lives.

I look at my watch. There are twenty minutes left. I shake my head, for I cannot work this problem. In fact, I cannot work any of them, and the failure of a test seems as inevitable as the victory of currents.

With my head bent, I look up from under my eyebrows and glance obliquely at Miss Brethwaite, who paces back and forth in front of the class. She has snow-white hair and the profile of George Washington. She could be the father of our country except for her bosom, which is huge, like infinity. It juts from her, and she rests her crossed arms on the solid shelf of it. Her fingers, which drape over the starched yards of white cotton blouse, tap impatiently against the side of each breast. I think that there is so much endless firmament to her that the drumming must be inconsequential. I imagine her bosom to be like the universe, impervious to Albert Einstein's little fingers tapping on its wavy glass window. What did he see when on his tiptoes he first peered into heaven's cabin?

Forever, I think. Her chest. He saw Miss Brethwaite's breasts. And then I wonder if, when Miss Brethwaite was young, any man lost himself amongst her unbuttoned blouse, her uncorseted flesh, her immeasurable world. And could she remain impervious? She is, after all, an old maid. I wonder because I am just a girl. We have very little in common, Miss Brethwaite and I, except a curiosity about infinity. And what is that? Surely something more than velocity but less than love.

The Present

Mama wakes me up as she does every morning. "How early it is of late!" she whispers over me, and then she tugs on my toe as she leaves the room.

Early and late. I wonder if that is what the present is, a combination of the past and future. Do we need early and do we need late to have now? And what is now?

I look at the photograph on my wall, taken of my grandmother when she was sixteen—my age. It is an early version of her, not a late one, and her hair, curling in long heavy ringlets around her head, looks like black iron pipe. Because her gaze is demurely directed to the side, I have placed the photo so that the young woman in it looks shyly down at me in bed. From early in her life she looks out to late in her life: she looks at me. And I look back at her. I think where our gazes meet is now.

In the summer, I have tried to catch the horny toads that live in the high desert west of Buckle. I wiggle my fingers in front of their upside-down eyes, hypnotizing them. As they watch transfixed, my other hand comes round from the side to grab their tails. If I am fast enough and nab them, their tails break off, and I am left holding just a pinch. The present is like a horny toad, I think. You can't grab it directly because it's too fast, and if for an eyeblink you do, all you have is a tiny dried scale of something already lost under the sagebrush world. I know every morning when Mama grabs my toe, she is grabbing the present we are in. It is transitory, and there is not a way to talk of it as there is for early and late.

Miss Brethwaite has told us about the Doppler effect. This is the principle in physics that says a sound coming at you is louder than a sound going away from you. I know it is right at that moment when the sound is even with you that you are in the present. It is when you feel most alive.

I know this by walking in the fields where Daddy keeps his horses. Often they straggle over to me, one at a time, and then stroll along. But sometimes they don't see me right away, so busy are they with their grass and each other, chewing on one another's withers, grooming each other's rumps, insulting each other with the slap of a tail, stomping on one another's hooves. Those are the times I like best, those when they don't see me.

I hurry by, purposely not looking at them. After I am well past, I assume one of them happens to notice me. Quickly the information is conveyed to the others. The conveyance is silent; it is not a whinny or a nicker. I suspect it is the long particular stare of the one that alerts them all, and soon they stop their business. In a bunch, then, they come galloping.

I hear them, their sound coming toward me, the pound of earth both hollow and full, the ragged breath that comes with running and the liquid snorts that come with excitement. They are all I hear, but I keep looking ahead, to where I am going. I move toward a specific riffle in the creek. It is the future, and known by me. And I remember that before they started, the horses were in the shade of the blasted but green cottonwood. It is the past, and also known by me. The sound of the horses gets louder and louder, and then it is upon me, the present, and it is deafening and dappled in gray and black and sorrel and bay. Then the sound goes away, into the future where I am headed. I love my father's horses.

"Miss Brethwaite says I will pass physics," I announce as I come in to breakfast.

My sister, home for the weekend from college, snorts. "How?"

I stare at her as I sit down. If she were not my sister, I would like her. She is lively and good at everything. She majors in literature and mathematics, representing both my mother's and father's strengths. I think when she was conceived, my parents still lived in the city, and the kind of marriage they had made them balanced. They leaned into each other evenly, like the two sides of an isosceles triangle. When they conceived me, though, they had moved here, to Buckle, and it was Daddy's choice, and they supported each other unevenly, like a right triangle. I think when they made me, Mama was mad at him, so I am short on one side—my father's. She left that analytical part out to spite him. My sister received an A from Miss Brethwaite. "Miss Brethwaite says my work has been so interesting that I will pass. That's how," I say.

This is a half-truth. What Miss Brethwaite said was, "You write excellent science fiction on every lab report and exam you submit. If I don't pass you, you will be here forever because you are a moon-eyed girl."

I know what moon-eyed things are. I know because we once had a moon-eyed dog. His name was Moon, and he was a lunatic. When Daddy would go riding, he would get his saddle out and then go get the horse. When he came back, Moon would run to the saddle to guard it. He would not let Daddy near his own saddle. He would not let Daddy near him. Daddy would have to rope the dog and tie him to the fence post. He would come in laughing and say, "I have had to lasso the moon again."

The dog was such a lunatic that he could not take the sun. In just three years, his pale moon eyes clouded over with crusty brown pigment, and he was blind. Daddy put him down. He is buried up behind the house, where the deer run, because that is what Moon liked best to do—to chase them in some long, panting, unspoken now of a gully.

Daddy always buries our animals where they were happiest. Sometimes when I walk amongst the fields, I stumble on the indentations of lives lost under the sagebrush world.

The Past

"Phillip Steen likes me," I tell Mama. "Too much."

She and my sister and I sit around the old kitchen table, scarred by one of its previous users. Along with some old furniture, our house came with anecdotes, and we have cozied into them, both the furniture and the stories. The table, from the cookhouse, is signed by Lyle, who long before I was born blew his hands off with dynamite. He thought the fuse had extinguished, and he went to relight it. Afterward, he wore two silver hooks. Like some of us push our silverware around a table, he must have scratched away with whatever hand he wrote, and eventually Lyle appeared. His name floats on the table like a soul on a Ouija board. Most days I lightly place my hands on the name, wanting to ask the dead man questions, questions that have changed as I have. When I was little, I wondered if his wrists got colder in the wintertime, or how he held his horse's reins. But now I ask more adult questions like, "Did you ever dance again with a girl at the grange, and did she hold tightly to your hooks?" Or, "How did you button and unbutton your pants and your shirt? Was there a woman to do it, and if she did undress you, did you long to feel her flesh with your lost hands?"

As I trace his name with my finger, finishing it, preserving it with my own skin's oils, I look at the south-facing window, where another tale—one of someone my own age—is present. It is a long, drawn-out line slashed across the glass pane, wavy in its making and blued by its age. The sister of Lydia Pyeatt put it there. The story goes that a young man gave her an engagement ring with a diamond, but he was a cowhand, a poor boy, and she distrusted his ability to provide her with anything so pure. She took the ring and dragged its diamond down the window. That he truly loved her is proven in the etched glass in this house, day after day and decades after their deaths. Mama told me the story, as she used to visit Lydia in the nursing home. I would like to go see the old woman and hear about my house's past, but Mama says Lydia cannot tell me. "She has lost her mind," she explains. "Where do you think she placed it?" I once asked Mama, and she grinned at me. She thought I was teasing.

"How could anyone like you too much?" Mama glances at me as she slides a piece of lodgepole into the cookstove. "You are worthy of all the affection you receive." She does not use the stove so much for cooking as for the warmth it gives her. "You should be flattered that such a nice boy likes you." She quietly drops the iron latch on the firebox. "He's good to have in a crowd of kids. He's like the piece of green cottonwood you throw into the cookstove to calm the fire."

My sister and I look at each other and roll our eyes, in agreement for a change. Though we do not travel in the same universe now, neither of us is interested in boys who cool. We are after boys of willow or aspen—we are after boys of fast and fierce heat.

"Who do you like?" My sister has waited until Mama has left the kitchen.

I am not sure I trust her with the information. I hesitate. "Fergus Meagher."

"He is very hot," she says.

I am pleased by her response.

"Did you know he's named after a county?" My sister smirks

"He is not. He is named after Fergus, the fairy king in Yeats's poetry."

"I cannot believe you think that. His last name is Meagher, like the county."

"He cannot help his surname. He was born with it."

"But his first name is also a county. That could have been helped."

"That is coincidence."

"What is his big brother's name?"

"Which big brother?" I stall for time.

"The oldest."

"Lewis."

"And is that a county?"

"Yes."

"And his next big brother?"

"Carter."

"And ..." She has the smile of victory on her face.

"A county."

"And the rest of the batch?" She makes them sound like cookies out of a cutter.

"Clark ... Judith ... Bonner ... Dawson ... Cassia ..." They are all in my state government book.

"Why do you think they have all those children? They must be either Catholic or Mormon." She is smug, for there are no Catholics in this valley. "I am sure that a Mormon couple named all their children after counties but for one. And they named him after an Irish Catholic fairy king."

"They could have." I say it without conviction. Instead of looking at her, I stare at Lyle on the table, quickly tracing his name, and then I look out the etched window at the falling snow.

Mama has come back into the kitchen. She is aware of the silence. "What are you girls not talking about?"

(Continues...)

Excerpted from Conjugations of the Verb To Be by Glen Chamberlain. Copyright © 2011 Glen Chamberlain. Excerpted by permission of DELPHINIUM BOOKS.
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