ISSUES | fall 1995

The silver and black Lakenvelder was the best. A rooster shiny like marble, a purple ribbon winner if I ever saw one. Big. He could kick a hole in my jeans with his fifth toe, sharp like a diamond.

“Class Picture, My Grandmother As Teacher, 1922”
“Beldora Burrell”
“Leda”
“Simple Arithmetic”
“Esther S.”

It is late spring, and the leaves of the tobacco plants are beginning to yellow from their tips inward. William Noble stands in his tobacco field and stares across the road at Mincy Jones’ property. He is trying to understand why Mincy won’t give him the hay that he has earned.

Here is Sylvia, in the audience again. She’s hunkered down on the rec-center astroturf, surrounded by kids, but none of them are hers.

I play guitar and sing “The Squeak Squeak song,” Squeak up! goes the refrain, Squeak now or forever hold your peace! Cute.

On the island I practiced winding, fashioning a slick, tight neurological cocoon around my interior ferment — the usual stuff: guilt, anger and, especially, fear. Not perfect, but God knows it worked, and I presented a seamlessness and continued to fly missions.

Wednesday, Feb. 18, 1913

My dear husband,

This is my first letter to you. Whether it will be the last is still a matter of conjecture on my part. But I simply cannot resist telling you of our interview this morning.

“Elegy As Evening, As Exodus”
“Decadence: Newport Beach, California”
“In Any Country”
“Mother To Daughter”
“Copper Wire”
“20th Century Boy”

“Sirius Rising”
“Heat Lightning”
“Rhapsody”
“Darkling, I Listen”
“Rapunzel In Thebes”
“Home Thoughts”

We arrived in Durango a day late, our bodies creaky after fourteen hours on a bus.

I slept most of the trip, but Kansas was antsy. He tapped his feet, played drums on his knees, went to the bathroom twice an hour, chatted up the bus driver so much that the guy told him to go back to his seat.

Interviewer: You seem to have very definite ideas about the function of family stories, and the whole principle of storytelling. Can you tell us about those ideas?

Jiles: Storytelling is a participatory sport, not a spectator sport. It’s one that anybody can indulge in, and is expected to, in families that still have the old traditions, and even in some that don’t.

There are images sharply fixed in my memory from my youngest sister’s disappearance in 1980, though most of them are things I never actually saw. One is the face of her murderer, who in the weeks before her death stopped his car twice to offer me a ride as I walked the mile and a half home from the bus stop. Another is a confused vision of this man dragging Doris off her bicycle into his car. Nobody saw this happen, but it comes to me when I try to understand her death, to comprehend an essentially senseless act of violence.

Violence was on my mind when I went to see palaeoecologist Paul Martin at the University of Arizona’s Desert Lab in Tucson. The night before, my first night in town, I had stopped at a convenience store to make a phone call. A teenage boy grabbed my purse. We scuffled, he ran, and I was on the ground, my wallet still gripped under my arm, my legs waving feebly. I felt like an overturned potato bug.