Volume 2, Number 1, Fall 2000

In this issue of RIVER TEETH:

Jessie Harriman / "Among women"

Women breathe questions into one another. They question with their hands, with their fingers, slipping in and out of jeans pockets. A woman tosses her hair back over one shoulder as if to ask the other at the table, Am I alluring? Should I braid it? Color it? The woman at the table hums a quiet song and nudges the mason jar by her plate, posing the cut daffodils in the light: Will I always set just one place for supper? Will he come? A daffodil bends left. This is how she asks for comfort, and her song grows softer.

Last night’s rain has drained the air of all but blue. I am outside listening to the singing of birds. The Daniel Boone National Forest begins at the tip of my fingertips, while civilization spreads the opposite way. My sons are in the house playing a board game, one I played with my brother as a child, but one of the boys gets mad and the laughter stops. As the sun rises high, the heat douses the singing of the birds.

Remember how you’d ask me why I couldn’t ever “say things straight”? Well, forgive me again: I dug up this old photograph, and my mind just took off. Can you let me ramble? I wonder if you’re sweating in the picture. Like you, I sweat like a racehorse myself, even when everybody else is shivering. Odd that I thought about this when I found the snapshot. The photo’s ancient enough that such details are left to my strange imagination. But that’s true of so much between us. I can see the trees are leafless, but that could mean early spring, late fall, or winter. All the Alabama seasons are hot by our standards. So, yes, you’ll soon be mopping your brow; I recall the gesture well.

Driving to the river is listening to the highway moan in cold asphalt, syllables that rasp a clean wave from Omaha to Lincoln. Driving to the river is looking ahead, past the curve of I-80 where the horizon glows in soft ambers at sunrise, and the sudden, gleaming promise of the Platte near Ashland. Driving to the river is finding that delicate bird-bone in the schoolyard you could almost put in your mouth, which has waited months and years for your small hand to bring it back to the land of the living and the dying. It is the primordial yearning of all living things that sings in the blood, vowelless and clear, past humming and breathing, taking us forward, taking us back.

Stand on the ford below his house, Davis Creek more pebble than water underfoot, and it’s difficult to picture the place as it was that night in 1969. But that night the water raced 50 feet deep at this ford. Houses washed away, and their pieces flew down the creek and into the Rockfish River and across Nelson County into the James. Twenty Huffmans were in the wreckage.

The rain fell so hard that mountainsides turned to pudding and swallowed up forests and farms. It fell on a village one valley over, and when it stopped, most of Massies Mill wasn’t there any more. A few miles west, the Maury River ran a half-mile wide and faster than a racehorse, and it carried off entire families.

It didn’t matter what I had intended in the beginning when I followed the trail with my family; somewhere I had taken a wrong turn and found myself staring at him for the third time in 30 years. Twice before I had seen him, kneeling in Rainbow House, hunched over in concentration. Some primal force had conspired to show me once more the embodiment of a singular, unremitting passion. It was like stripping away all experiences until I was again 14, standing beside a beehive oven, tasting green chili stew for the first time.

Mrs. Eleanor Venesky was of the opinion in January 1995 that she was about to die, although she had no hard medical evidence to suggest it. She had been of that opinion for some years and was still of that opinion when I met her seven months later. Some days, the weight of the notion pinned her to the davenport; she would spend long afternoons there, stretched out beneath a thin cotton blanket, listening to her music box and nursing her discontent. Other days, the notion had no weight at all. In fact, it was lighter than air. It lifted her up and carried her into battle.

I think of my brunch with the murderer often, even though our date was in April 1994. I remember so clearly how I sat on the edge of the bed in the Tempe, Ariz., hotel where I was staying and dialed his number as if I was a hard-edged investigative reporter and not a person who avoided making phone calls the way others avoided the known habitats of poisonous snakes. No, I called the number I had found in the phone book, and when his wife answered the phone, I coolly identified myself, more or less explaining why I wanted to speak to her husband. When the murderer—James Hamm—got on the line, I started off with great out-of-body confidence by saying that he had served time in the honor dorms in the same penitentiary with the man who had murdered my sister in 1966, when I was 17, and that I thought he might be able to tell me things about my sister’s murderer, a man whose heart and motivations remained unknown to me.

The true-crime story has a long and occasionally distinguished history in the annals of American literature. Poe’s attempt in “The Mystery of Marie Roget” to solve the 1842 murder of Mary Rogers, and Dreiser’s version of the 1906 Grace Brown murder in An American Tragedy are two of the best known and more “literary” examples. By true-crime story I mean not merely a fiction that borrows plot patterns from real events, but rather a narrative whose effect is partly dependent upon the reader’s awareness that past events are to some degree being reconstructed. That is, the true-crime story is either extended journalism or a variation of the roman a clef, in which the author enters the public domain as a kind of detective, simultaneously fictionalizing and reconstructing the crime (almost inevitably murder) in order to supplement the public record. The allure of true crime is precisely its openness to reconstruction; as Sara L. Knox observes, “Every tale of murder arises in and on uncertainty, and no definitive tale can exist” (205)

Just before my 21st birthday, I hitchhiked across Europe with one of my girlfriends from college. We weren’t afraid, though now I realize there were times we should have been. Like the time in Greece when, past midnight on a nearly deserted road, the two truckers told us there was something wrong with the engine and they needed us to get out so they could get the tools from under the seat. There was nothing wrong with the engine, we knew enough to know that, and so we sat still and cried and said thalassa, thalassa, thalassa, which means ocean, over and over, and pretty soon the two men got back in the truck and drove on through the night to the ferry.

My husband and I decided to rent a car and take the 25-mile drive into the hills northwest of Zurich, because I wanted a glimpse into what my father’s life might have been without Hitler. Our destination was Endingen and Lengnau, two Swiss villages that were said to be like my father’s German village, two hours north in the Schwarzwald. All were tiny, rural communities (under 2,000) with an unusually high proportion of Jews in my father’s day (almost 50 percent in 1900) who did the same kind of work: cattle dealing. But Switzerland had no Holocaust, not even a Kristallnacht, so Swiss Jewish life was not destroyed by the Nazis. Even its old synagogues are intact and in use today.

The Bay Center for Birth Control is a small, squat building made of yellow brick. It sits back of the road, behind a stamp-sized yard, dwarfed and doomed by the gleaming towers that surround it on all sides. An unforgiving sun pricks my scalp as I tramp across the pathway to its frosted glass door. My boyfriend leans against the low stone wall near the street, whistling under his breath.

The waiting room is tiny, bare except for banners advertising International Women’s Day and some other feminist festivals. A large chart lists the names and failure rates of various contraceptive devices. No safe sex posters here. This is the ’70s, before we knew about HIV and AIDS, when the worst consequences of sex were unwanted pregnancies, botched abortions, broken hearts.

There is a little snow on the ground, mostly packed into ice. It takes extra muscles to keep the knees flexed to avoid slipping, and extra concentration to spot slick spots. I step in Amy’s tracks when I can see them. When I can’t, I step in the same spot anyway, secure behind her muscular legs and her nature-woman pigtail thickly flopping to her waist. Not that I’m frail myself. I am a couple inches taller than Amy. I look great for my age, particularly my legs, and I move well. Still, I have to work to keep up. Like the old days, hiking behind my father. He would be silently moving ahead, free as a fox, while the branches and brush tried to trap me in my mother’s life. I would point out a blue heron, hoping I had it right. I try to think of something now to say to Amy, to appear nonchalant. She doesn’t talk much. She doesn’t need to, or she’s shy—I haven’t been able to figure out which.

The remarkable Cincinnati journalism of Lafcadio Hearn has been appropriately called his “period of the gruesome” by one biographer. Between November 1872 and April 1878, Hearn wrote about 450 news stories, features, essays, and reviews primarily for the Cincinnati Daily and Sunday Enquirer and later the Cincinnati Commercial. The reportage is graphic in detail and often horrifying in content. The articles were not for the squeamish. Many of them are too gruesomely graphic to be published in today’s general circulation newspapers. Yet, these daring, exciting, and controversial articles, some of which were not reprinted until the 1990s, are important in the reconsideration of Hearn’s development as a writer, the early use of literary devices in nonfiction writing, and as a reflection of American journalism in the late 19th century.

"The Lord only,” once observed Officer Patsy Brazil, “knows what Dolly’s real name is.”

Dolly was a brown, broad-shouldered girl of the levee, with the lithe strength of a pantheress in her compactly-knit figure, and owning one of those peculiar faces which at once attract and puzzle by their very uniqueness—a face that possessed a strange comeliness when viewed at certain angles, especially half-profile, and that would have seemed very soft and youthful but for the shadow of its heavy black brows, perpetually knitted Medusa-wise, as though by everlasting pain, above a pair of great, dark, keen, steady eyes. It was a face, perhaps, rather Egyptian than aught else; fresh with a youthful roundness, and sweetened by a sensitive, passionate, pouting mouth.

The alarm woke Jason Hadwick at quarter to six. He got up from his single bed in his messy crowded room. His model airplanes were suspended from the ceiling as if they were dive-bombing his head. The fish tanks gurgled. He put on a black T-shirt, baggy shorts, and black leather boots with a circled A, the symbol for anarchy, scrawled in white ink on the sides.

He left his chains in his room. He couldn’t wear the bicycle chains and metal links that hung suspended between his back and front pockets in a long loop below his right knee. It was against the rules at Carson High School now. That was OK. The chains were too heavy to wear all day anyway. He could still wear the three earrings and two metal necklaces that identified him as a punk.