The Force of Right Words
Yankee Pride
All or Nothing
You could say the lie was a story about what didn’t happen.
Not the tale of my falling and snapping the plastic stock
of a friend’s Christmas-gift toy rifle. I told it,
the stretcher, to his mother. And didn’t hesitate,
having schooled Wes, the friend, to nod and say nothing.
She had questions. And her line of interrogation was laced
with threat. The Cuban Missile Crisis had shaken us that year,
a fear for which there is no approximation or metaphor.
Kids had developed the habit of looking skyward in dread
and anticipation much of the time they played outdoors.
I saw that sky in the look on the face of Bernie Vines,
Wes’ mother. The light of All-Things-American, too.
Some are born to lying. I was a natural—angel-faced,
a few whisper-touch brushstrokes of Frightened Boy—
the sort of kid aware which details work. In what order.
Shared truth does exist, I discovered, but is contingent
upon its utterance not sounding like a scratched LP,
not repeating what the hearer expects to glide through.
It seems a lie can clear the air of a quantity of truth
after which a friend’s trusting mother will accept
the hypothetical presence of rowdy older boys,
lanky representatives of the Likely and Possible
descended out of nowhere like crows to carrion.
Marauders from elsewhere. Adolescent thugs
coveting a replica-by-Mattel Winchester rifle.
Bernie bought my story until she got Wes alone.
Said what mothers say to solicit big-T Truth.
When she stormed across a shared sideyard
to enlighten my mother, she wasn’t smiling.
But then she was. Bernie Vines was a nurse.
A veteran of the day-to-day and hour-to-hour
earthly realities of What’s True Most of the Time,
minus the fine gold pixie dust we toss about for luck.
But I’d somehow shown that her austere morality
and principled moment can extend outward as it
bends. Like a length of plastic before it snaps.
The smile was that part of a clear blue Ohio sky
unfilled by Doom, untrafficked yet by missiles.
It said she was amazed at the ease with which
she’d believed me. And I remember thinking,
You’re going to get punished but not as bad.
All that winter Jerry Hagerman had talked Jesus, quoting Scripture.
Smoke for which there was no ceremony or language hung in the air.
The smoke, now that I think of it, might have been the cigarette fires
in the ashtray of his ’60 Oldsmobile. Then he went home to Delaware
and came back with two jars of clear liquid. Yankee pride, he called it.
Rested the jars on a kitchen table. This is Daddy’s first since they let him
out of the penitentiary. First through new copper. I was maybe 14, a kid,
trusting a pomade-in-the-hair ex-football star from Delaware who knew
at least a part of the raucous truth of the world, having been in the Army.
Born-again Jerry got a kick out of pouring me a tumbler. Saying, Drink it.
That day, I learned every scalding atom of it has a grudge against the body.
I didn’t smell it. I downed it like 7UP. One greedy mouthful, trusting Jerry
who said he put his trust in the red-lettered passages of the New Testament.
When couples groove on a dance floor, nasty-dancing like Bacchic initiates,
acolytes performing their duties in a temple of tail-chasing, it’s moonshine
that has them up, doing the Dirty Boogie. Oh, I puked. Through my nose,
dry-heaving again and again with the force of a simple prayer for absolution
until the American Standard toilet god was satisfied I’d sacrificed enough.
That whisky burned like Perdition flames. If you believe there’s a Perdition.
If you believe what Jerry did. If you swallow some, all, or any part of it.
If he saw the bright day outside, it did not deter him.
—Carlos Baker, Ernest Hemingway: A Life Story
His biographer Carlos Baker says that it was a cloudless morning.
He says Hemingway knew the guns were locked in the basement
and knew the keys to the gun cabinet were on the window ledge
above the kitchen sink. He tells us the famous man moved about
in blue pajamas and a red robe. We hear that Ernest Hemingway
tiptoed, not wanting to wake his wife. Baker says he woke early,
as always; that the Idaho basement smelled “as dank as a grave”—
nothing like the antiseptic smell of the room at the Mayo Clinic
in Minnesota where he wrote Saw some good bass jump in the river
and signed your good friend who misses you much with a flourish.
I want to understand the shock treatments, what convinced doctors
he was fit to be discharged. These are facts to a story we imagine
ending in sacramental dark with a locked door and a bang. However,
Hemingway wasn’t about to end his life in a basement. We’re told
his wife had sung to him the night before, that he was in the basement
only to retrieve what he needed and then took the stairs to the foyer.
In the light, with his back to a bank of shadows that wouldn’t be
easily dismissed, he slipped two shells into a double-barreled Boss
not because he believed in God or his good fortune at having a woman
sing to him in Italian his last night on the blue golden green earth but
because he believed in the grace that comes from doing a thing right.
In 2009, Roy Bentley was awarded an IA fellowship in poetry by the Florida Division of Cultural Affairs. He is also a six-time winner of the Ohio Arts Council individual artist fellowship. His last book (The Trouble with a Short Horse in Montana) won the White Pine poetry prize and was published in 2006. He published two other books—Boy in a Boat (University of Alabama, 1986) and Any One Man (Bottom Dog, 1992)—and won a Creative Writing Fellowship in Poetry from the NEA (2002). A chapbook, Magnificent Strangers, was published by Pudding House Press. His poems have appeared in the Southern Review, Shenandoah, The American Literary Review, Pleiades, and Prairie Schooner among others. Recent work has been in Sou’wester, North American Review, The Laurel Review, MARGIE and Cold Mountain Review.
