Joe Burke's Last Stand

John Moncure Wetterau

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• Publié par: seab
• Publié le: 01 décembre 2010
• Nombre de lectures: 33
• Langue: English

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The Project Gutenberg eBook, Joe Burke's Last
Stand, by John Moncure Wetterau
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Title: Joe Burke's Last Stand
Author: John Moncure Wetterau
Release Date: February 9, 2004 [eBook #11004]
Language: English
***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG
EBOOK JOE BURKE'S LAST STAND***
Copyright (c) 2003 by John Moncure Wetterau
Joe Burke's Last StandEvery Story Is A Love Story
John Moncure Wetterau
(c) 2000 by John Moncure Wetterau
Library of Congress Number: 00-193498
ISBN #: Hardcover 0-7388-1663-9
ISBN #: Softcover 0-9729587-2-X
This work is licensed under the Creative Commons
Attribution-NoDerivs-NonCommercial License.
Essentially, anyone is free to copy, distribute, or
perform this copyrighted work for non-commercial
uses only, so long as the work is preserved
verbatim and is attributed to the author. To view a
copy of this license, visit
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd-nc/1.0/or send a letter to:
Creative Commons 559 Nathan Abbott Way
Stanford, California 94305, USA.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters,
places, and incidents are the product of the
author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any
resemblance to any actual persons, living or dead,
or to any events or locales is entirely coincidental.
Published by:
Fox Print Books 137 Emery Street Portland, Maine
04102
207.775.6860
[e-mail]
Thanks to Larry Dake, Christopher Evers, Bruce
Gordon, Majo Keleshian,
Jane Lowenstein, Sylvester Pollet, and Nancy
Wallace for valuable
suggestions and invaluable support. Gino's poem,
"Aesthetic," is by
Sylvester Pollet and is used with his permission.Cover print: copy after Ogata Korin, 1658-1716.
This book is for Rosy
Joe Burke's Last Stand
1
"My rig's a little old, but that don't mean she's slow
—Batman—that don't mean she's slow." Joe Burke
was singing, driving south. His rig was a blue Ford
pickup with a battered cap on the back. Batman, all
six inches of him, was propped upright on the
dash.
Joe followed signs to the Weston Priory, climbing
through woods and out onto an open plateau. A
cluster of wooden buildings stood near a pond. A
monk was raking leaves from a path that curved
around the pond like a trotter's track. Joe got out,stretched, and entered a gift shop by the parking
lot. A middle aged woman seated next to the cash
register closed her book.
"Where is everybody? Rehearsing?" She smiled
slightly and remained silent. "Lovely day," Joe said.
"Yes, isn't it."
He bought a cassette made by the monks. "A bit
stagy, Batman," he said climbing into the truck and
closing the door. "We must continue to seek truth
and contend with the forces of evil." Batman stared
resolutely ahead.
Joe cut over to the interstate. When he reached
the highway, he played the cassette: resonant
voices and a single guitar, encouraging. "Sappy,"
Ingrid had declared impatiently. Joe smiled. She
was free of his taste in music now—had been for a
year and a half.
At Brattleboro, he turned off the highway, rented a
motel room, and walked into town. He found a
brew pub where he sat at a corner table with a pint
of ruby brown ale—cool and fresh, the malt veiled
with lacy astringent hops. He had another and
watched the bartender talk on the telephone, her
elbows and breasts on the bar, a vertical worry line
dropping between her eyes. She was about his
daughter Kate's age. The room began to fill, the
nasal sound of New York mixing with flat New
England tones. The Connecticut River valley
narrows in Brattleboro, a gateway to upper New
England for New Yorkers. He was going through inEngland for New Yorkers. He was going through in
the other direction, trying to figure out what to do
next. What do you do at 52 when the kids are
grown? The same things all over again?
He took out a notebook and remembered the drive
—the blue sky, the red and gold ridges, small fields
tilting greenly in their arms. On such a day, one
could almost be forgiven, he wrote.
A blonde woman with a wry smile, an experienced
charmer, sat down at the next table. He considered
having another ale, making friends with her and
starting a new life in Brattleboro or over the
mountain in Bennington, but he knew that he was
fooling himself. It was too familiar; he might as well
have stayed in Maine.
"Gotta go," he said to her sadly. She raised her
eyebrows, acknowledging the human condition,
and he walked back to the motel. At the edge of
town, trees were dark behind a body of water that
was platinum and still. Fish broke the surface with
soft slaps in the centers of expanding circles. Ansel
Adams might have caught the many shades of
silver just before the lights went out.
The next afternoon Joe was across the Hudson,
driving through the mountains on roads that were
more crowded than he remembered. There were
many new houses and the trees were larger. He
stopped on the hill by his grandparents' old house
in Woodstock. Captain Ben had retired during the
depression to that rocky hillside and made a
homely paradise of gardens and fruit trees. A slowsilent job. Emily was beside him, canning, cooking,
and mothering. They said you couldn't grow pears
around there. We ate a lot of pears, Joe thought.
And plums, apples, rhubarb, strawberries,
asparagus . . . The house smelled of geraniums
from the solar greenhouse that his grandfather
built onto the dining room long before anyone ever
heard of a solar greenhouse.
Captain Ben was a son of an old Virginia family
who in better days had owned Monticello. Lee's
Lieutenants lined a living room shelf. Noblesse
oblige came with mother's milk. You are born
privileged; you have an obligation. He had a
company garden when he was serving in the
Philippines—men who got out of line did time
weeding and afterwards ate fresh vegetables.
Once a year he would go to town and whip the
touring chess master who was playing 20 people at
once. "Pawn to King's four," he taught Joe, "control
the center." Joe opened with pawn to Queen's
knight four, bringing a smile. "Learn the hard way,
huh?"
He died when Joe was in seventh grade, and Joe
spent his high school years with his grandmother,
well cared for, but living more or less alone. She
remarried about the time Joe graduated. The new
husband moved Lee's Lieutenants to the attic and
Joe moved out. The house that Joe remembered
had disappeared inside a gaudy renovation, but the
mountains hadn't changed. What is it about land,
Joe wondered. It gets inside you, deep as your
loves, maybe deeper.He ate dinner in town. He saw Aaron Shultis across
the street, but Aaron didn't recognize him after
twenty-five years. Joe drove back into the hills and
parked by a narrow lane across from the one room
schoolhouse where he had gone to fifth grade. He
fell asleep in a cradle of memories: fucking Sally in
this very spot . . . apple fights, BB gun fights, the
sound of the schoolhouse bell calling them out of
the woods after a long recess.
A steady rain was bringing down the leaves when
Joe woke up. He drove over to Morgan's house
and pounded on the door. When Morgan opened,
Joe could smell breakfast cooking.
"Joe, well, well. What brings you out in the rain?"
"Hey, Morgan, bacon! They say you're cooking
bacon."
"They're right. Come on in."
"Remember that time you were hitching to Florida
and you met those guys heading for Georgia
because they'd heard that a Salvation Army cook
was serving meat?"
"Some trip that was." Morgan was grayer but still
powerful. "So, what are you doing?"
"Starting over. I've been saving since Ingrid and I
split up. I put a bed in the back of the truck, got rid
of a bunch of stuff, and here I am."
"When did you leave? You want some eggs?""Three days ago. That's affirmative on the eggs,"
Joe said. "I've had it with computer programming.
Jamming all that stuff in your head messes you up.
You wake up at two in the morning and start
working."
"Good money," Morgan said.
"For good reason."
"Did you sell everything?"
"Just about. Kept my tools, a couple of boxes of
books, some clothes.
Kept the cat, Jeremy, but he jumped ship on Deer
Isle at my father's.
Oh yeah, my notebooks, a footlocker full—I was
wondering if you'd
stash them for me. I'd hate to lose them; they go
all the way back."
"Sure. Maybe you'll write a book one of these
days."
"I don't know; all I ever do is look at things and try
to describe them. Should have been a painter like