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  • In America, and: April 10, 1988, and: After, Climbing Dragon’s Tooth
  • Ed Falco (bio)

In America

Fields of wheat, weeds, waste, a barn burning in prairie light, a cathedral plain. Salmon clouds over the Blue Ridge where as a boy I once, where a child wears winter clothes on a dirt trail and you’re lost with someone else’s family. He knows where the bodies are buried. L opens a window in airy Storm Lake Iowa, while P waited on a Kansas City street corner tucked a gun into her pants hidden under a baggy Harvard sweatshirt. A drugged dreamed sprint. Tito grasps the bat just as his father proud watching from the bleachers showed him knowing his son might play in the majors or Wall Street or Washington after he floated to shore on the wreck of an old fishing boat half drowned just out of Castro’s prisons. The sun white and rising out of the Atlantic. We’re all brothers and sisters in the arms of God. We’re alone under a brutal sky. Here, in America. The sun red and setting in the Pacific.

April 10, 1988

Sun in black-and-white is white and the field beneath it is black, where I’m standing with my brother, midday. That’s the old farmhouse behind us. It’s red but not in this snapshot. In this snapshot it’s black. Though not black, really. A shade of gray. The red farmhouse is a lighter gray than our suit jackets, which are almost black. A white carnation in the lapel of my jacket. I’m being confirmed. This is my confirmation day, April 10, 1988. I look like I’m about eight, though I’m probably older. My brother [End Page 141] is in his mid-twenties, and women have always loved him, all women it seems to me now: our mother, our aunts, both of our sisters, and in high school I was too young to remember but I’m told all the girls. This is the year Vietnam begins to pull its troops out of Kampuchea, and that country disappears, along with Pol Pot, before it reappears as Cambodia, again, missing a couple million murdered. In this world, the year I’m confirmed, the sky is the lightest shade of gray, and it rushes on forever behind our black suits and the farmhouse and the fields. The year our mother took a course in photography (thus the black-and-white picture), a year before she moved in with her teacher and then married him and lived a few miles away with a new family. My brother moved to San Francisco before he moved back a few years later, when I was just starting high school. He was sick. He moved back into his old bedroom and only lasted a few months. At the funeral so many women were crying it was like a wave of tears breaking over the fields that stretched out beyond the home all the way to the farmhouse and this black-and-white picture, which I hold in my hand as I look at my brother, long gone, on the day I was confirmed, with a white carnation pinned to my jacket.

After, Climbing Dragon’s Tooth

All that week and for a long time after, nothing was the same: the wind on Dragon’s Tooth, sunlight over the valley, a young woman who asked if I knew the name of a kind of tree. Late afternoon sunlight, wind bullying treetops along the ridge. She was in her early twenties, dressed in jeans and a t, with white and red and bright green in her sneakers. One girl climbing on the way up—this was a popular trail and the spring day drew us out, mostly from the college (everyone’s from the college around [End Page 142] here)—wore a vt cap with a maroon and black ribbon pinned on the brim.

I had read that after a great trauma part of the mind remains for many months locked in rethinking, and I imagined a room-sized computer programmed to answer the question “Why is there suffering in...

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