Don Irving

This personal essay is a chapter of a memoir entitled, Traveling Widely On A Dead End Road. Rape sears the soul. You will leak blood onto the page unless you let emotion cool after each revision . Writing is revision. I was taught that, then I taught it, and this time I practiced the principle, arriving at a narrative voice of embattled detachment. - Don Irving

She was raped in a wreck of a barn so picturesque that city photographers have worn a path around the canted hull... silver and charcoal wood with weather-etched grain that stares back at you with dust-bowl starkness. "She" because I don't know her name. No one else ever said it if they knew it either. I heard the story first from the person the victim disclosed it to, a woman who runs the Phillips station on the Darkwater. I heard later the edited version from the good old boys abuzz at the long refectory table for farmers in the Jeremiad Café next door. The woman who gave me the first-hand account said she came into the station limping and barefoot and left blood on the floor, said to call the patrol. She'd been raped.

Times are bad out here now but they weren't good then, either. Crops... such a word, such a bitter laugh... didn't get planted on time, the soil packed or soupy with spring rains. When at last tillage could be made they chewed up the clods and chunked in the seed. April's torrential promise got taken back again and June, July and August said no, not this year, sorry. So September found us dry that year as well with the exception that corn prices were up because of the estimated short crop, yet prices had not gone up enough to cheer any farmer here who'd reap short, unfilled ears and flat soy pods. We were all a-moan like the besotted hero of Malc Lowrey's Under the Volcano.

But hell, the eggs were fresh and good at the café and nobody yet under the gavel and the pig truckers still stopping in, the pigs all a-squeal through the little round breathing holes in the big aluminum rigs. The pig men order huge breakfasts full of pork... sausage, ham, bacon... and eggs, and fill their paunches, some damned overripe, the belt crossing their upper thighs and the buckle protected by a thick human flap. A wonder there's a pig-trucker breakfast at all, for hog prices were bottoming out back then as well and their rigs a long way from paid for.

They kicked the situation all round the room anyway, saying, mainly, she was asking for it, with her thumb out and all, hiking on down here from Blue Springs, looking for a ride and just sore she got "both rides for free," or so I heard one say.

Sometimes, the smoke too thick in the air and heat rising under the scalp, you have to get away, some damned diversion, say fishing. In the Jeremiad Café, it's always sour complaint and general travail; farm funk. Or listen to the news, daily, nightly, and feel the apathy grow with each bombardment, the world's Jeremiad Café brought into your home, minus the smell of pigs and sweat. So I did go fishing in the hidden lake beyond the dogleg on our dead-end road, a lake tucked like a snowball in a handkerchief as it sinks into the cleft of hills and I stayed until sunset, floating, catching, turning back every one, large and small. I just did not want to kill one, flay it with a knife.

Sunrise and sunset and signs in between mean a lot to one who refuses to abide by a timepiece, won't own or carry or wear one. But you cannot stop thought. What came to me was the odd lack of compassion among people equally beset by unreasonable and indomitable forces.

When I'd turned the boat upright and slid it into the pocket in the lilies for launch, there was this good-sized young wood rat. Stayed in the boat, though I shooed it and told it in no uncertain terms to get the hell out. It refused, hunkering down. So I said, fine, just keep your place and be sea-borne with me. We put out, rat and me. Just as we approached the willow island, a haven for bass on a good day, a coot... a dingy old mud-hen... took off, flapping water and squawking, and I thought isn't this the damnedest thing? Left the inner city for this place, cheap and clean... left all the hookers and junkies, the screwballs, the punks and the homeless shufflers with their bent-up grocery carts... and here I am, locked in to the ugly, the worthless coots and the rat I'm poling around like a latter-day Charon. The rat is, by then, up under the far seat, regarding me with timid curiosity, twitching nose and whiskers, brown eyes too big for its face. I assured my passenger that this was in no way precedent, that there was a long tradition to back us, from when traders first went down to their ships and to sea with rats.

Thoughts keep rising when the fish don't. Thought is forfeiture. So if she were so intent on a good time, signaled by an upturned thumb alongside the roadway, according to some, then why, after her "good time" did she come in and report it as rape? She had to know about the indignities to follow, what with the sensitive gentility of our small-town deputies, most male, so if she'd been in the mood to ride a cock-horse to the Banbury Cross she ought to have the right to choose that. Doesn't sound like a choice was offered. That's rape, say the law books.

Then the bass started hitting the lures and the light on the lake at evening coerced belief in a better world.

*

That barn is a mile and a half from anthing civilized. How long, by the way, has "civilization" been a work in progress? Joyce called it "syphilization," a gear-notch closer to truth when you think of the number of rapes the radio and newspapers bring daily, and rape more than ever a stratagem of warfare to break down a people. Civilization has got itself caught in a leg-hold trap and refuses to chew off its leg.

She had no shoes. No shoes. Taking them away gave him time to get a good way down the road; and the road from that limberlost barn is gravel, hard and sharp three-quarter agates that roll and cut and bruise. Blood on the floor. I could not have done it, discalced as a Carmelite nun with no vow taken. My feet are too tender. Isn't taking her shoes an admission she'd given no consent? Or did she throw them away to make her story better than his because he'd cheated, lied, mistreated or promised something never delivered? Blood on the floor. She must have known she'd be telling her story to male authorities, that the edge would be with whom she knew to be an assailant but who they might suspect was a john or an old boyfriend.

Had to be a rape.

I buy my stamps and my feed at the little town that serves my postal address. Four miles to smell that sweet feed inside the Jeep I had then. Sometimes I'd postpone off-loading, except for a bag needed, and haul it around a few days for the aroma. Two hundred and fourteen people, according to the sign, yet all I ever see outdoors is a pack of curs after a bitch in perpetual heat. All the staring, bristly coats on the pups in the town look alike. So, too, a lot of the people. The postmistress knows me by name, of course, so she unburdened a large drawer of her newest issues to entice my fancy. A stamp is not a stamp to her but something to be shared, a part of the letter's message, overall. I selected a Louis Armstrong set, because jazz, all about love and loss, is my thing... all three of them are. These turned out to be in short supply. She said: "Let me send you the new jazz stamps due next week with the route man. He'll leave you an envelope. You can pay later." It's hard not to love this place.

Over about two hills to the north of my place is the Billion Dollar Phantasy Ranch, a juice bar run by two swarthy bozos of Kansas City, more feared than wanted and unaccustomed to hearing the word "no." At the BDPR, one can purchase a nice, exotic lap-dance for one's hard currency. Hundreds of randy bucks do their grunting there because it is there, right across from the town's airport. Dudes from Kansas City on the make for business deals fly their coastal prospects down here in two- and four-seater planes and pay for the evening's voyeurism while they get in their flying hours, hide their goings-on from neighbors and wives and sweeten their sticks, same trip.

Somehow I prefer the plain postmistress, auburn hair in a bun, a ready smile thick glass and plain dress, a person who trots out for all the latest issues and sends them to my mailbox on speculation.

Hell, I'm randy and raunchy, too, but no voyeur. Without consummation, what good is it? About as good as a negative compared to the developed picture. Life here gets lonely for me as for anyone. Most women find my place wild and in hospitable or without proper amenity, so for awhile I tried self-gratification, trying also to dredge up fuzzy past images. I'd given up even this. It's just too damned sad. You have to think of all the lonely men and women, boys and girls, in a barren nation, cuddling and fondling their own genitalia; the sadness hits home hard. What we've got here is a national pudenal crisis on our hands. In them. Unremittingly I ask myself what could be sadder. Yet, I'm randy as the next, as I said, an envelope of weirdly-coded DNA and acquired idiosyncrasy. I have to be in love or severely self-deluded. Then I'm wild and experimental and eclectic, an assemblage of disparate parts trying for wholeness. Would I do anything a partner would allow? Hell yes. But "allow" is the key. Can there be mutual pleasure without mutual consent? How could there be? Among people I've known and with whom examined the matter, all seem to agree that the gratification of the partner can be the bigger kick, or at least equal to one's own gratification. That may require "love" or at least compassion, generosity.

Fishing should be all diversion, but when the fishing's becalmed, thinking hooks the fisher once again. The fish ignore the tangible while the intangible prevails.

Instinct brought me out here. Loneliness set in next. Contemplation forces me to crystallize my position. This is where I want to be. No turning back because there is no "back" to turn to. At least I listened to the meager intuition of my feminine side and called this home. I nest at last.

The Institute of Complainers-by-Carhartt (the rural Ralph Lauren) at the café's long, long table have their view of things, a John Deere view... on the ground, right in front of them... always concrete and black-and-white. They seek and receive consensus on every issue; there's a general among them of speaking a new, tangential view and being labeled "odd." So one-think is inevitable here if one is to fit in and remain; aught else is sedition. After all, they all were taught by the same teacher in a tiny schoolhouse, ill-heated but by God orderly, and she taught them all they ever cared to learn.

My house is on a hillcrest. The light at evening over the land that unrolls below it makes you believe the world is right all is on time and the cosmos full of truth and longings fulfilled and no wrong could befall a single soul in this vast containment. That light is so pure and it makes me take up a glass or two to even handle its lofty clarity, then the revealing light settles more gently as it wanes and draws off the land and at last I know the sun will set and the dampered light of August and September will go out. I finished the evening splitting cordwood in my locust wood-light. I looked up to see the most phenomenal thing: A prairie falcon, large and long of tail, swooped low, then fell as if shot, wings tucked, down upon a three-day-old lamb I'd just this day let out of the jug with her mother and twin brother. The falcon struggled to get herself airborne with a lamb in her talons, almost failing to rise and fly free. But then she bested gravity, the lamb piercing air with a last terrified bleat, and she lofted over the horizon to the west where the sun hid its eyes in the setting. And that was that. The old confused ewe bawled a few times, then turned her attentions to the twin that remained at her side, and they made for the barn.

I saw the rightness of it, isn't that curious? An episode that might have struck me with portent and a sense of unfairness did not. I picked up my splitting maul and headed home to cook some supper. What else? Sit and weep? All my childhood friends, the boys I'd call out from their homes to come play sandlot ball, are gone. They all managed to leave in the last two years. Three in all. Phenomenal. Did they "go home?" Will I go there too? Am I just the late one, as always? I've raised children and some of them have raised their own and even they have left out for their new lives. I'm alone and thus fair game. So why can't I seem to see the big picture after just catching a startling glimpse of it? I sat sipping that night, wondering where my lamb had gone and not why. Yet why that lamb out of so many? Not grief. Simply wonder. Where do they go? Where do we go? We must all be born into some space or void of made room and then, leaving, make room for the next space traveler. It's no original idea, probably, but it has a kind of neatness to it.

That dark night, the stars out sharp... the kind that make tiny pinholes in your brain... I drove down to the barn. That barn. Don't ask why. I have and there's no answer. A sliver of moon shone but no electricity in the barn, so I took a flashlight. I walked in and the battery began the usual failing incipience of batteries: The light dimmed, then contracted and died within the moment. All I could see and see by was the brilliant starlight through a large rent in the roof. Did she see starlight that night? Or did his hand yoke her neck and hold her in a position in which she could only gaze at the nether world while he bucked behind her, perhaps for her to wonder whether she'd end up buried under the rotting straw or die later of AIDS or worse, become pregnant with genes from hell itself. It seemed to matter to me what she saw that night, starlight or darkness, sky or the earth under both of them... or nothing, a withdrawing from the moment and the act.

No answers, of course, only starlight piercing me from above.

I suppose it's odd I'd come here to consider these possibilities, but I felt I needed to know, to really know that which she will have to know and think about the rest of her life.

I heard of a young girl, eight or nine, born without the seventh cranial nerve's terminal branches that allow facial movements, especially for smiling. She could not smile as she was. A surgical procedure was conceived, to transplant a nerve from her lower to where the cranial nerve had left off, in the hope of ending her facial passivity. She was quoted as saying that she desperately wanted to smile, to be able to give back the smiles of those classmates who continued to smile at her... despite the others who had come to believe she was just solemn or moody. She said that would be first, to give back the smiles.

It cheered me to hear of such a restorative procedure, but what gladdened me most was to know that after all years of her glum expression and the shunning that resulted, she still wanted to smile. More than anything, just to smile.

We know the rapist out here. We might say hello to him every day. We know him, but we don't know which one he is. It hit me as I left the barn in darkness. Simple. Logical. Who else would know this barn, know it to be abandoned. He pulled off a well-traveled highway and drove directly back to a remote, nearly hidden barn on a dead-end road. He knew it was there, just there and waiting, safe, at his disposal you might say. He waves to me from his pickup. I wave back. Which one is he? So many pickups, so many waves; a custom. To whom am I waving?

She, too, was at his disposal, any woman with her thumb up along a nighttime road. Like the old boys in the café, he knew she was asking for it; and when she said no, she was already too late because the male's pulsing readiness is a turgidity not to be denied, a necessity to mount... anything, anyone, maybe himself... which would and could not be thwarted. Venery. Such a word. Referring as it does to both, the hunting of game or the game of the hunt, for sex. Two meanings, one word. Wait, aren't fox or raccoon, objects of the chase, impaled at the end? Who can stop when they're at last brought to bay?

"It's the times," said one of the old boys in the café, "she just got what she ast for," though I found "the times" reference somewhat hard to carry through and the conclusion a non sequitur.

But try to change that one-room schoolhouse of the near-grown; easier to assume the role of the king of Rumania.

I suppose the astounding thing to me was the ephemeral topicality of the rape. Abuzz for a day and then nothing. Or, if one took the cynical view, this was predictable. If there was mention in the police reports section of the local paper, I missed it. This, too, is understandable. Here we squat as a budding bedroom community for the Kansas City folks who come here just as I did, to colonize. Reports like that lead to blushing, and there goes the neighborhood. We don't like to talk about our little cottage industries out here... the meth labs and the cannabis fields... for fear notoriety will overwhelm migration here by those with a cotton-candied view of how we live and love one another. You can't be too careful for the filmy dream is gone. Forget that the shopping cart coming your way in the market is being stocked by him, the rapist, one of our good old boys. He smiles.

That barn, so picturesque, could be a black-and-white photo in a coffee-table book you cherish. Missouriana.