Eisenhower

Lane 19 W. Lane Eisenhower All through the fifties it was bible school for me in summer, coloring pictures of Jesus and the companionable thieves asleep on their crosses, adding thick smears of light yellow as butter to their weary paper sky; but when I lay my head down on my desk and shut one eye, I thought I saw the manikins who stood for us suffering a dream of manikins in their frame houses, tested on the desert floor of the newsreel, flying through rooms end over end, through space that lifted them it seemed solely by its changed nature. Mother, father, sister, brother, what mattered was their sudden helplessness and loose-limbed flight after such seated poise in the kitchens of doom as if all weight had fled them. What pulled them westward with its breath was the future boiling in a cloud at the end of the movie. To a boy's eye their fate was normalcy pulled inside out like a sock, promising to every citizen, to every child a death spacious as a galaxy. 20 the minnesota review Soon, being Protestant, we stood to receive the wafer of forgetfulness on our freethinking, animal tongues. It could have been read then in the stillness of our heads how we too were marked for manikinhood, some for golfers, some for preachers, some to play golf on the moon; and how we stiffened at the sound of our own elaborate names and the sounding of the chime! But for awhile the wafer did its work. When Eisenhower rode through town in an open car pointing at the flag waving children, one here one there, I noted the vigor of his arm and assumed he was giving a gift by leaving his signature on the air. We shook our flags even harder in response and our shepherds barked happily. This was America, these things were things we suffered without understanding: Finger prints on our glassy innocence are these words and voices now decades old; shards of a prophecy, a bowl long shattered, hard, repetitive, untranslatable as nails. ...