May the Circle be Unbroken

A Land-Loper

You call me that, and so I am, here on this riverbankcorner of your claim. I do no harm. A simple dugout,my horse grazing, a campfire for cooking the fish I catch—there’s a bucketful, stay and eat. The Divining Divine, yes,that’s who I once was, not am. Now I hire out to helpbuild sod houses, cultivate fields, bring in harvests.For twenty years handbills pictured me, white surpliceand tie: God’s Optimist for Iowa. My sermons were notthe usual German opera sing-song and whipsawing,nor was I a Dunkard in literal rivers. A sprinkle fromthe bronze font I carried on my circuit would do.To me the Word revealed no spiders God suspends over Hellon a whim of thread, no rotted floorboards we blithelywalk upon, no shaking and slavering and conniption fits,only sweet grace erasing sins as surely as if theywere written on chalkboards of the schoolhouseswhere I preached. “Divining,” I said, because for a smallconsideration I would dowse the claims of those I’d baptizedfor a small consideration. My gift was a double one—water and lead—though when the rod quivered and dippedI didn’t know which, so cried here at a few spots and piledstone cairns, then nailed the forked stick to the house door,ends-up like a horseshoe so faith could fill it. Who could lose?A homesteader, pick-axing, struck water or lead’scrystalline arcs and coils. You’ve seen hereabouts thosetowers where molten lead falls a hundred feet through sievesinto water, becoming Union grapeshot and Miniè balls?You find me here because my Madonna of the Prairie,whose sod house I stopped at one July-noon athirst,was a married woman, childless. She had spread men’s clothing on bushes in the sun, denim and cotton drill boiled in lye,and her husband was gone buying seed corn.I drank deeply, water my gift had not found. I founda cornhusk bed, sheets of woven gunnysack thread.When the sod roof let fall a blue racer into my hat,we laughed. But gossip found us out, and I came to understandGod’s capricious thread, the rotted flooring. My circuit?Gone on the wings of the Paraclete. Hand me that bait canif you would. Yes, that sumac there has a witching fork,but veins and pockets of lead no longer signal me.And even if it flowed an hour’s easy digging underfootI couldn’t divine the Mississippi I’m fishing in.

Wizard

A track of abrasive grains on the kitchen counter:he’s been sharpening cutlery, pushing and pulling,each blade riding V-shaped grinding surfacesmounted on plastic wheels. The decals thereremind him of the Road Runner’s whirling legs.

Though this Edge Wizard wasn’t the reasonhe went alone and for the first timeto the dollar store where his wife bought shoelaces,sewing supplies, flower pots, and seeds.The law of physics holding that no energyis ever lost, does it apply to joy? grief?he wonders. Does it apply to the soul?

And then he smiles, rememberingthe warning on the bubble-plastic package:“Care important not to sharpening away too far.”Which made him imagine a child crankinga pencil down to a nub because he can’t stopwatching it disappear. In the next aisle a woman stocking shelves was singingMay the Circle Be Unbroken.

He glances up at the corkboard mountedon the kitchen wall—ranks of wishbonesunbroken and tacked ends-up like horseshoes,each year labeled. Their wholenessitself a wish, he sees now. Centering himselfon the Wizard, on the carving knife it’srunning a line of silver light along, he remembers

a knife grinder from childhood, a womanin a babushka and long skirt. Kids gatheredwhen she set up in the neighborhood,taking from her pushcart a bicycle riggedto chain-drive a grinding-wheel, then callingbring out your knives. When she moved...