RENEWING THE WESTERN

The usual words attached to sentimentality are "maudlin, cloying, contrived, sickly" and I've gone along with that, but was brought up short by the information that our classic American authors consciously considered "sentiment" to be a legitimate philosophical idea.  In modern terms it translates to attachment, visceral comfort, and justification.  Is not our concern for children sentimental?  Why otherwise would a small not-yet-formed human be more important than a potent fully developed man with a role in the world?  Why else would we give a care to the people living on the sidewalk in rag tents?  Sentiment is often portrayed as an indulgence of prosperous people -- not the ultra rich, but the comfortable. 

This is from the unknown writer in Wikipedia:  "In the mid-18th century, a querulous lady had complained to Richardson: "What, in your opinion, is the meaning of the word sentimental, so much in vogue among the polite...Everything clever and agreeable is comprehended in that word...such a one is a sentimental man; we were a sentimental party". What she was observing was the way the term was becoming a European obsession—part of the Enlightenment drive to foster the individual's capacity to recognise virtue at a visceral level. Everywhere in the sentimental novel or the sentimental comedy, "lively and effusive emotion is celebrated as evidence of a good heart". Moral philosophers saw sentimentality as a cure for social isolation; and Adam Smith indeed considered that "the poets and romance writers, who best paint...domestic affections, Racine and Voltaire; Richardson, Maurivaux and Riccoboni; are, in such cases, much better instructors than Zeno" and the Stoics."

I'm more or less signed up with the Stoics because of my stiff-necked attitude of right and wrong.  But also because this was my mother's unexpressed but lived philosophy of sucking it up when times are tough. She covered it up with sentiment, but her sentiment broke over grief when things didn't turned out as they should.  My stoicism is more like resistance to authority, including hers.  I was one of those things that didn't turn out.

When the last "new" version of "Little Women" came out in the movies, I invited my mother to go see it, but she refused as she did for all the old familiar beloved films, because she remembered them with such affection and a kind of virtual reality of fiction.  So recently I watched the "Masterpiece Theatre" version but was braced to protect my generation's version with Elizabeth Taylor, Margaret O'Brien, and June Allyson as Jo.  Who the heck played Meg?  This fancy PBS version was rich with period detail, particularly the kind of "white" clothes made possible by needlework before the sewing machine -- all frills, ruffles, detail, embroidery.  It was unquestionably sentimental in the way that "Uncle Tom's Cabin," "Black Beauty", and "Mrs. Wiggs in the Cabbage Patch" were, powerful enough to be engines of progressivism.   In fact, the novels of my grandmothers which I read at the age of formation -- by Gene Stratton-Porter in particular -- were novels of sentimental feeling.  Even our contemporary porny romance films subscribe to sentimental philosophy, depending on your gut reaction to them being a guide.

Much of Montana and other parts of the West were "settled" (invaded) by resource-exploiting New England men with sentimental wives, which was interpreted as being genteel and cultured.  This meant the relationship to the indigenous and pre-existing people was conflicted.  At least it provoked the novels of Wallace Stegner and A. B. Guthrie, Jr.  I cross this divide when I came to Browning because of my alliance with Bob Scriver, who was born there in 1914 and whose family was uneasily disturbed by it.

I often think about writing fiction that would exploit the phenomenon of the West-depicting artist in the Sixties and challenge the sentimentality.  I just read an essay by John Williams written the year I graduated from undergrad college (1961).  I don't know why it is being reread now and I never read any of his novels.  He suggests that the Western is a reaction to two New England forces:  the Calvinist strictness of the founding English church and the Emersonian rethinking of it to make allowance for sentiment, particularly something like German nature worship.  That is, his viscera respond to the land.  Williams never makes a comparison to the powerful callous money-making father versus the tender, comforting love of the home-making mother.  So I'll claim it.

In the same online session I came across Siobhan Leddy's essay about Ursula LeGuin's historical thread contrasting the woman's "carrier bag, sling, shell or gourd."  (She doesn't bring into it the womb.) She contrasts this to the male spear's "phallic murderous logic."  So it would be easy to use what I know about Bob Scriver's prior-to-art business of taxidermy -- not distorted, arsenic-poisoned, amateur taxidermy which has taken a drubbing from recent tales -- but a serious attempt to reverse death.

Old ranchers, often tribal people, were aware of difficulties that arose between Bob and I.  One said to me, "I always thought Scriver worked his women too hard."  (I was the third of four.)  Others advised him that because I was of child-bearing age that I ought to have a baby.  The welcome substitute we shared was wildlife babies: bobcats, foxes, badgers, gophers, an eagle, and so on.  Some of them grew up sleeping between us.  

The dark side of the solution was that these pets were biologically programmed to separate and leave.  They did.  Sometimes they died.  So nurturing often ended in grief, until the marriage also ended. Then I gave birth to myself, but I never wanted a human baby, because of the possible grief.  "Marmee" sobs, "I can't control my girls if they DIE."

Links to the essays mentioned.

https://lithub.com/john-williams-considers-the-literary-western-or-lack-thereof-c-1961/

https://theoutline.com/post/7886/ursula-le-guin-carrier-bag-theory?zd=1&zi=yrynz3ce

RESORTING TO WESTERNS DIDN'T WORK

Every morning I get up and go to the computer in hopes of the news that Trump is at last indicted and marched outta Mar-a-Lago still clutching a drumstick.  And every morning there’s another indictment of someone with an unpronounceable name, more discovery and documentation to analyze.  I keep thinking of the aftermath of 9/11 when the “lady media” kept saying,  “Oh, migod, they’ve been here all along, so many of them, so powerful, so organized, just waiting . . .”

Old stories, repetitious because they were learned by old men from their own WWII and Cold War experiences.  Now renewed because the young men want new stories, new clothes, and mostly they’ve got them.  But everything has gone twisty and embarrassing.  While young men were attending hook-up bars, the old power-play men were inviting little girls over to be impressed when the male sophisticates stand next to the swimming pool in an open robe with their dicks dangling.   It’s not that they can’t afford Viagra— their docs won’t let them take the stuff, because of their bad hearts..  Women aren’t what they used to be.  Hefner is dead.  The culture has come around the dial to “repressive” again and these guys never were Rainbow Family anyway.

The young men?  I can’t shake the memory of a recent twitter from a baffled innocent male forlornly asking,  “Do women even have orgasms?  Or it is something they just make up?”  Did Masters and Johnson do all that work half-a-century ago for nothing?  Or can’t this kid read?  (Probably.)

So I thought a good Western would be a relief.  

“Longmire” has ended.  In my early Western-viewing I had a theory that the more heroic the hero was, the tighter his pants would be.  But there’s an endpoint, of course, and then the seats begin to split.  Sheriff Longmire is not in danger of that.  The inseams of his britches are too long so his pantlegs are sort of rumpled up.  Now it’s the women who are wearing pants so tight you could count their pubic hairs if they didn’t shave them.

Many vid stories in series are about two communities: the one of the invented characters in the story and the one that’s the people who make the stories.  In the case of “Longmire”, the “Indians” are real because of the cast.  Not exactly enrolled in every case, they are connected and aware of the larger NA community.  

I did not realize until I googled for this piece that Zahn McClarnon (Mathias) has Browning connections.  The father of one of my students in Heart Butte acted in movies and had a “casting catalogue” that the student brought to school to show me.  She said she could get me a date with Graham Greene, whom I admire very much.  That set of Canadian-trained actors is aging out, but they’ve changed the nature of Westerns for the better.

http://www.auditionsfree.com/tag/native-american-actors/  announces casting calls.   http://www.nativecelebs.com  lists the actors themselves.  Google to find more.

I’m sorry to say that “Godless” is “otherwise”,  book-based in a world that can’t make up its mind about books. Or Indians.  Or powerful men.  Or violence.  Or whether anyone ever really falls in love.  No one gets drafted anymore.  Life is full of choices and the big consideration is the debts you might incur.  It’s all ambiguity and the rules keep changing.  The world is not just “god less,” it’s without order or predictability.  All is “women, cards and whiskey” they claim in the series to be the three causes of war in the West.  NOT.  It’s simply survival.  Always.

The eerie familiarity of all the death scenes in “Godless” comes from our constant exposure to news of Afghanistan et al, scene after scene of corpses in small ruined towns of adobe instead of green sawn wood.  Maybe the attraction for the screenwriter/director was that it’s an historical continuity and therefore less than an atrocity because it always happens.  I suppose I’m tiresome to think that.  But a lot of real life is tiresome.  And altogether too inevitable.  

Like, it just had to happen that “Longmire” ended with a full-out nude love episode between sheriff and deputy — the fans demanded it.  But for me it was jarring — I mean it was sort of like your parents going to bed together, if you’re old enough that Marshall Dillon and Miss Kitty were part of your growing up.  I guess these two post-sexual-revolution modern lovers did okay — we all watch and judge even though we KNOW they are just pretending with the camera lens a foot from their faces.  But they didn’t decide to get married.  That hearts-and-flowers stuff is for pillowy deputies.  It doesn’t look like this is “forever love,” anyway.  Maybe now there’s no such thing except for dogs.

Anyway, as powerful and principled as Miss Kitty was, she was no “Vic” who echoes warriors and sci-fi bionics.  I want to note that Sackhoff grew up in St. Helens which is in the downwind shadow of the Hanford Atomic Research Center.  I’m sure her thyroid cancer is a direct result of that.  I hope she is as tough as she acts, with her thrust-out duck lips and defiantly stuck-out butt.  Her image of the raw-boned Scandinavian warrior is re-echoed by Gwendoline Christie’s “Brienne of Tarth.”  And we have examples around here.  They run businesses.

The casting of “Godless” is a little more problematic.  I was never convinced by Michelle Dockery, esp. when standing next to Tantoo Cardinal.  It took me a while to connect Scoot McNairy to his previous role in “Halt and Catch Fire,” though it was good casting to put him in a classic role:  the incompetent or greenhorn who manages to save the day.  (“The Virginian,” “When a Man’s a Man.”)  How is it that Sam Waterston wandered in only to be blasted?  What the heck are all those naked women doing wandering around?  Or is it just one German naturist?  And I've never heard of anyone persuading horses to lie down

The story ambles along with insertions of marginally relevant bits like lesbian/whore love and buffalo soldiers looking remarkably fit after their dehumanizing war campaigns and acting like the Métis descendants of fur-trappers, complete with fiddles and intent to farm.  I liked that skinny sapling kid.  I liked Mary Agnes.  Is the buckskin the near-sighted sheriff rides just like the one Matt Dillon used to ride?  And how about that all-out shoot-out  (I was gonna say "balls out" but half the combatants didn't have 'em, didn't need 'em.)

The cinematography is fabulous as Westerns always are, but much helped by drones, I suspect.  One long sequence is a little concerto of flying water when a posse of horses crosses a river.  Flecks of light dance everywhere, almost obscuring the action.  But there’s distance in it — not participation.

Maybe distance is what we want now.  Maybe the Western has moved to Australia.

"THE NATIONS" by Thomas F. Sheehan

In spite of what the academics say, there is a whole community of Western writers who still spin traditional yarns and get them published.  For a while I was writing that kind of stories and sending them to Rope and Wire (www.ropeandwire.com) until I got a little too racy for them.  Scott Giese, whose spread this is, will accept violence but not sex.  Anyone can read the Western stories for free on the website.

In the process I discovered Thomas F. Sheehan.  Among the books I’ve boxed to give away is his book called “The Nations”.  But I keep pulling it back out.  It’s one-of-a-kind, an early Western anthology by him, so naive that he keeps saying “squaw, buck, papoose”, words that would get you punched out in a lot of places.  He calls a female sheep a “yew.”  All his stories are kind of dream fantasies, not just the ones about Native Americans.  But I can’t imagine what the Canadians who are breaking up friendships over Joseph Boyden’s “The Orenda” would do with these stories.  They’re more like Longfellow’s “Hiawatha” than anything else I can think of, if Longfellow wrote pulp fiction.  They’re from a boys’ world.

In sonorous poetic prose the tales unwind from a main character with a remarkable name, the Euro ones as much as the supposedly Anglicized tribal ones.  Hides-Inside-Rocks meets Varden DeNoncoeur.  Jed Bolyx and Adam Flinkfelt interact with Twisted Water, Broken Feather, Tall Answer and So Sioux Said.

Tom has a unique vision full of caves and turtles.  White men keep finding Indian babies to raise and Indian men capture white babies to raise.  The tales are plainly meant to be inspiring but sometimes they’re just corn-ball — then again, a few sentences later, they are transcendent.  They are outrageous clichés and somehow unique.  I’ll use space to give a sort of sub-story which is inside a longer version.  The idea is that “I”, a first person narrator who is unaccountably omniscient, is about to be hung unjustly.  He is an “Indian.”

“But this man, this hangman, this stolid executioner, does not come pompous.  He does not wear his vestments the way some of the lawmen do that hold sway in the region.  Slowly he moves, patient, making no circus of his deed.  He must value life, this hangman, in the most obvious conflict of deed and duty.

And as I look down upon him, I am caused to lift my eyes and there lies my mountains rising against the great sky, green and white and fiery red and orange in a sunset, with red slashes in steep stone faces, and the lines of ridges showing where the trails and paths are secret to the Sioux and the black mouths of the caves where some of the gods take to rest, where I chased my puma and met my maiden and high above, past the tree lines I see the snow lines where the sheep have tried in vain to hide from my arrows.

At this time, as the hangman rises slowly and somberly up the steps to reach me, I am visited by memories borne upon the mountains so sweet and so swift they rush through me like the wind in a long cave, and the sound of music comes along on that wind and quick breath cuts off corners like erosion itself is taking place at my ear.

His eyes are sad eyes as he looks at me.  They peer out from the slits in his black mask, so blue I think of a tarn up high on the mountain where I swam as a boy with Red Eagle and Chosen Hand who have gone on long before me in the wars.  A bit of hair sits on his face and his chin, some of it gray and some brown as yet, and the sadness also sits in the corners of his mouth where those lips say sadness is about us this day, as if he makes convert announcements at his tasks.

No hatred fills me about him or his task, but only the hurrying sense of innocence that rushes through me trying to be found, but I cannot cry it out or shed tears to gain an edge for my innocence.  His shirt is neat.  He wears no badge or sign of status, nothing to say what he is, what he has come to do.  But only the sadness in his eyes.

“Son,” he says to me, lightly, almost a whisper, “I don’t have any hate for you or any Indian who does me no harm, though I have been subject to great pain in my past.  I have forgiven all things done unto me and unto mine.  I don’t know if you did the deed or deeds they have said came of your hands, for I am not a judge.  I only come to finish the work of the trial.  It is the way we do things. . . .”

Then in an almost silent gesture, a bare whisper, he slipped a prairie flower inside my shirt and said, “I have brought you a part of the great grass, to carry with you, to know the odor of the plains.”:

There’s another page to the story, but the upshot is that when the hangman goes to adjust the narrator’s collar and fit the rope under it, he discovers a mark that reveals that the man being hanged is his son.  The hangman is white but his son was captured as a child and raised as an “Indian.”  All Sheehan’s stories end with this sort of twist.  They’re like a murder mystery in which one last clue makes all the others fall into place.

This sort of writing is almost like a child’s, or a conscious dream, or an internet fanfiction — the set of parameters is so personal it can’t really be considered a political pitch and yet it comes from a deep set of convictions — religious meaning, in fact.  Sheehan’s experience as a soldier in Korea taught him a lot about strategy, bushwhacking and shooting — he’s an American Sniper.  But he’s not a redneck fighting PTSD.  Instead he makes a quiet pitch for peace, using the Old West as a set of chess pieces and board.

I just don’t want to give the book away.  I want to keep it.

ARE WESTERNS GUT-SHOT?

Richard S. Wheeler

I’m going to tease Richard Wheeler.  I don’t know how he’ll take it.  If you don’t know him, he’s a writer who has actually made a living at writing, mostly Westerns, for decades.  Sometimes people tell him he’s come to the end, but then he usually figures out some way to go on.  He’s got enough money stashed to retire and claims he will when he gets old, but he’s only eighty, looking dapper in his blazer and lace-up shoes.

In his last blog post he said he had finally realized, “I am bourgeois and a middlebrow.”  This caused me to laugh out loud, not because I disagree, but because that’s such a bourgeois and middlebrow thing to worry about, really concepts from decades ago, but Wheeler IS a bit of a fossil.  He notes: “But for some reason, middlebrow had acquired a stigma, mostly having to do with lack of intellectual courage or some other inadequacy.”  This is also true enough, but only in the college towns or the Artsy ones like Livingston.  In Valier they are proud to be middlebrow town burghers.  And, actually, that’s who has always loved Wheeler’s books.  The guy who runs the laundromat in Cut Bank is still wanting to talk about Wheeler's historical novel about the 19^th century earthquake in San Francisco. “Aftershocks.”

Here’s a list of Wheeler’s books.  http://www.fictiondb.com/author/richard-s-wheeler~30698.htm

Richard again:  “Academia doesn't know what to do about western fiction. English department critics tend to ignore the field, or condemn it, or contend it is too trivial to bother with, or that it romanticizes genocidal invasion of tribal lands. Mostly, the professors simply ignore the whole area. Ask them to name western novelists at the top of the field and they can't. Nor can they name titles. Or list books they have read.”

Cormac McCarthy

[This is not quite true.  Many are besotted with Cormac McCarthy.]

“Ask them what mysteries they have read, or the top authors in that field, or the top books and authors in science fiction, and you are likely to get some answers from them.  

“On the other hand, western literature is the only American genre that has won Pulitzer prizes, in fact three of them, which says a great deal about the importance and the quality of the field. The Pulitzer committee has given the prize to A. B. Guthrie, Jr., for The Way West; to Robert Lewis Taylor for The Travels of Jamie McPheeters; and to Larry McMurtry for Lonesome Dove. That record is unique. It is not matched by the mystery genre, or romance, or science fiction.”

Robert Lewis Taylor

Now I have to stop and comment again.  I looked up an online list of Pulitzers and see that Wheeler missed some Westerns:

Conrad Richter:  “The Town”

Wallace Stegner:  “Angle of Repose”

N. Scott Momaday:  “House Made of Dawn”

John Steinbeck:  “Grapes of Wrath”

Oliver La Farge:  “Laughing Boy: A Navajo Love Story”

A. B. Guthrie, Jr.

I’ve never heard of Robert Lewis Taylor.  I’ve had living conversations with Guthrie and, of course, would love to talk to McMurtry.  Richter and Stegner are classic definers of the West.  La Farge, an upper class anthropologist, is certainly an appealing writer even for kids.  N. Scott Momaday is as Indian as Indians can be, a great big embracing sort of person.  These are not people I would consider snobbish or difficult.  The only fault I see with them is that they are all male, though they all write with sympathy and insight about women.

N. Scott Momaday

It’s true that the fashion for a while -- maybe particularly for women and specifically for Indian women -- has been to write AGAINST the legends of the West which include abuse of females, often lethal.  Once the Pandora’s box of French post-modern, post-structural, post-colonial theory gets opened, we should probably ALL run for our lives.

Wheeler says:  “I suspect most English professors simply wish the field would vanish. It is largely historical and romantic, and celebrates an earlier conception of what America is about, and is less significant than contemporary stories about relationships and the perpetually wounded human animal. . . .”

“Highbrow writing is largely dull or beyond my comprehension, and lowbrow writing is a bore, so here I am, lost in the vast middle of the literary and cultural world.”

I think the problem is in the category set-up.  Maybe by “Westerns” he means tales about cowboys and the formation of frontier towns.  He likes to write about the fur-trade and mining.  I don’t think he has quite realized that “class is the new racism.”  Everyone’s “brow” has shattered into a hundred levels and kinds.  More than that there are dozens of delivery systems, each requiring a different sort of writing -- and I count images as writing.  We’ve about given up trying to make gender binary, so that’s a whole spectrum to explore, and I’m not talking about porn.  

What I see among the English professors is them hiding among the political shrubbery which comes perilously close to pandering to whomever uses “Rate my Professor.”  Students run the classes.  And professors are supposed to be “hot.”  At least three red peppers.

I don’t get the “perpetually wounded human animal.”  Maybe if the word order were changed around:  “perpetually wounding animal human,” meaning aggression from the dark subconscious brain lashing out defensively against the Other and then wondering what s/he has done.

There’s another Western writer (though he isn’t known much) from the stalwart Rope and Wire platform (www.ropeandwire.com)  who accepts the same terms for Westerns that Wheeler does.  That’s Tom Sheehan. https://www.smashwords.com/profile/view/TomSheehan  I left Rope and Wire when I turned out to be too sexy, but Sheehan doesn’t mind.  He’s another corporation guy with a writing private life -- not particularly brow-ish one way or the other.  Military core.  He just keeps turnin’ ‘em out.

Tom Sheehan

Westerns in film seem to be drifting back away from mockery and silliness.  I liked “The Homesman” most recently and “Sweetgrass” maybe just MOST.  (It’s a documentary.)  “Slow West” is almost here -- the preview clip looks a little tongue in cheek.  “Jimmy P” and “Winter in the Blood” are the best “real” Indian tales yet.  Solid literary roots.  And streaming, too !!  “Longmire” is close to reincarnating “Gunsmoke.”

Of course, all of prairiemary is Western.  You can’t get more Western than the East Slope of the Rockies almost at the 49^th Parallel.  I deliberately go genre jumping.

*********

“The rifleman stood in the wind, knowing he couldn’t be accurate -- mostly just make a big noise that might carry.  His hickory shirt stuck to his back but he was glad for suspenders that spared him from hitching up his jeans.  He didn’t want to move much because he didn’t want to attract the attention of a man driving way too fast on a gravel road.  It might be possible to shoot him if he got close enough.”

************

“Cutting.  Wasn’t that the old Blackfeet way that women grieved for a lost warrior?  But surely not with a razor blade -- surely with a big wide knife sharpened with a stone, carefully and slowly, getting exactly the right slant to the edge.  She wished for a razor blade.  She had no knife.  Just grief.  Endless grief.”

**************

“I hated it when my big brother decided to play keepaway.  This time he had my best pants in his hand and was whirling them over his head.  It was no use getting mad and going after him.  Just then the steer I’d been grooming for the fair spotted the whirling and decided to play.  He took my brother from the back, pitching him on his face in a mud puddle.  Luckily, the pants flew clear when the bully tried to catch himself.  I put ‘em on and took off with my steer behind me.  Both of us were enjoying ourselves.”

*****************

“Gravity was telling him he was lying on his back.  Nice not to be regaining consciousness without his face in the dirt.  Now, what was that smell?  Pretty strong.  Don’t tell.  Oh, he got it.  Sagebrush.  Why can’t he see?  Oh, he got that, too.  It’s night.  How did he get here?  Now, that’s gonna take some time.  That’s when he saw it glowing.”

*************

That last is a swipe at writing a Horror Western which is what “Bone Tomahawk” is supposed to be.  Just released.  How I loved that kid who showed up in Heart Butte once, sat in the front of the classroom and called, “Let’s all write Westerns!”  Opening his spiral notebook, already half-filled, he got right to it.

http://gravetapping.blogspot.com/  Nice interview with Wheeler.

TOM SHEEHAN WRITES ABOUT WAR among other things

Tom Sheehan

I might be the only person in Montana who knows Tom Sheehan, so I feel obligated to fill in this blank.    He’s very American, a veteran of the Korean War, and a long-time employee of Raytheon in Saugus, Massachusetts.  He wins all sorts of prizes but the Big Five publishers take no notice.  Somehow he manages to write in an old-fashioned plot vs. character way while all the time being curiously modern.  Hard to explain.  He writes about shooting, horses and bad guys -- all with extraordinary names and detail -- but he also manages a poetic grasp of detail and landscape.  He doesn’t stay in categories very well, but once he chooses his “method,” he knows what he’s doing.

So here’s what he did with one short story.  The title is “Aces and Eights” which is the hand of cards that the frontier gambler Will Bill Hickok was holding at the time of his death.  Bob Scriver did a sculpture and so have others. It’s kind of an American folk tale.

by Gib Singleton

In this version the main character is Sergeant Charlie Twohig who so loves to gamble that the cards are like an extension of his hands.  Hear the word echoes?  I think they’re rooted in Sheehan’s brain.  Some people don’t like the Hickok/Twohig reminder.  Writing workshop people sometimes classify alliteration with comma errors -- to be extirpated at once!  (I think it’s part of the Hemingway obsession.)  Nor do they appreciate the metaphor joke about hands of cards in hands who play cards so much that the cards becomes extensions of hands.  But this story is woven out of “tells,” the little giveaways of tick and gesture that a gambler can’t help happening but which are very helpful to a really “ace” player.

Tom Sheehan

The plot points come along like cards coming down.  The men are in a convoy of LST’s, frying under the sun, trying not to think about Ceylon, their ultimate destination.  An early scene is Twohig manipulating Corporal Tally Biggs into cutting cards for stakes.  His hands literally itch and he has a kind of “high” that he attributes to the heat but also to the prospect of a winning streak.  The heat is so intense that when a sweat-soaked soldier leans forward, there is a little explosion of steam from his back.  Biggs asks Private Jake Breda whether he has ever felt so intensely excited that he was sick from it.  Breda ("breed her") says only on his wedding night.  (This is an old-fashioned story.)  A little thread of sex weaves in.

Corporal Tally Biggs comes to sit by Charlie, who calls him “Twig”.  Twig suggests that without his ever-present cards, Charlie would seem naked.  Twohig agrees and gets him to cut cards though Biggs has already lost a lot of money to him.  Biggs is obsessing about sharks in the Red Sea but doesn’t twig to card sharps.

Having had enough fun with Biggs, Charlie moves to Captain Redmond.  The gambler has nothing but contempt for every one -- they’re all losers.  Redmond is ugly, stuffy, wearing a tie in the heat.  Twohig “accidentally” kicks his “box.”  But Redmond has aces in his pocket, letters from Twohig’s wife.  She clearly loves her mad gambler husband in spite of being much superior to him, but out of concern for him, she has betrayed him.  Redmond “has never had, owned or partaken of a woman for any extended period of time, though he knew how deep the hooks of a good, true love went.”  And he falls in love with his fancy of what Twohig’s wife is like:  “big of bust and hip, blond hair, bue eyes, skin like buttermilk, and tremendously good in bed.”  

Korean Graveyard Registration

Gradually we realize these men are not going into combat.  They are a “Graveyard Registration” company meant to find and ceremonially bury the dead, even the ones of their own company who die in the course of performing the task of search and burial.  Victims of ghastly torture need to be buried and the sight of them sticks to the insides of one’s eye, even in sleep.  Another writer might have gone into detail about rot and so on, but Sheehan only gives a few nasty little anecdotes.

Sheehan knows that the real story is in the uncomfortable relationships among the men, misunderstanding each other, keeping secrets, and building up hatreds and obsessions while somehow struggling forward with their assignment.  So the greedy gambler, who suddenly hits a period of good luck he would not be able to believe except that his health seems to be losing a long battle with tropical parasites and that interferes with his thinking.  He is so resented that his lethargy is interpreted as gold-bricking so he is pushed on and on.

This is genre writing -- for the people.  This is the sort of story that lends itself to telling around a campfire, oral literature.  But that would lose the little trills of poetry.  (“A licorice sensation ran through Charlie Twohig.”  I’m still thinking about that one!  Sweet, dark and a little funky -- twisted?)  But I’m thinking that all these hot-wire boundaries:  prose/poetry, written/oral, are just more academic distinctions from workshops.  When such fences are disregarded by writers with real skill and a strong sense of plot, they become powerful.

Part of the surprise in this story is how it all turns out in the end when all the little clues and tells pay off.  I won’t give it away, but in the end Charlie Twohig is no match for Redmond.

Tom Sheehan

From “Epic Cures: A Collection of Stories by Tom Sheehan.” (2005)  Press 53, PO Box 30314, Winston-Salem, NC  27130

I came to know Sheehan by reading his short stories on “Rope and Wire,” a website that refuses to give up the Westerns of the Fifties when the veterans were trying to find their feet.  Sheehan has almost 400 stories on this site: every one of them in the Western template.  Something unjust and terrible is happening, a hero with a clever name decides to do something about it, he faces impossible odds but wins in some improbable way.  The site owner doesn’t allow sex, which discouraged me, but Sheehan deftly leaves sex out.  I thought it was his taboo, but as I look at this collection, I see it was not.

http://www.ropeandwire.com/authors-spotlight:  Sheehan served in the 31st Infantry Regiment, Korea 1951 and graduated from Boston College in 1956. His print/eBooks are Epic Cures; Brief Cases, Short Spans (from Press 53); A Collection of Friends; From the Quickening (from Pocol Press).

Books from Milspeak Publishers include Korean Echoes, 2011, nominated for a Distinguished Military Award and The Westering, 2012, nominated for a National Book Award. 

His newest eBooks, from Danse Macabre/Lazarus/Anvil, are  Murder at the Forum, an NHL mystery novel, Death of a Lottery Foe, Death by Punishment and An Accountable Death. 

His work is in Rosebud (6 issues), The Linnet’s Wings (7 issues),Literary Orphans (4 issues including the Ireland issue), Ocean Magazine (8 issues), Frontier Tales (9 issues), Provo Canyon Review (2 issues), Western Online Magazine (9 issues).

His work has appeared in the following anthologies: Nazar Look, Eastlit, 3 A.M. Magazine, Appalachian Voices,  Jake’s Monthly Recollections, Lady Jane’s Miscellany, Loch Raven Review, Rusty Nail, Red Dirt Review, Erzahlungen, R&W Kindle #2 and; 4, Peripheral Sex, Storybrewhouse, Wheelhouse Magazine, Home of the Brave, Green Lantern Press, River Poets Journal , Writers Write and A Tall Ship, a Star, and Plunder.

He has 24 Pushcart nominations, and 375 stories on Rope and Wire Magazine. A new collection of short stories, In the Garden of Long Shadows, has gone to press with solid pre-release reviews and will be issued by Pocol Press this summer. 

Tom Sheehan, the family years

TOM SHEEHAN: A TWO-GUN WRITER AND POET

Tom Sheehan

Tom Sheehan writes in two genres:  template Westerns and poetic encomium.  You could say he's two-fisted.  He writes novels as well, but those are long guns.

The short stories are mostly on www.ropeandwire.com.  The template is Fifties TV series lasting 45 minutes. The main character is going along.  He is observant, resourceful, and responds to need.  Something unjust happens.  After considerable trouble, possibly the use of weapons, the hero restores order.  The language is old-fashioned, frontier style, and full of poetry disguised as exaggerated folk metaphors.  Very often a boy is involved.  The setting is an integrated virtual world, coherent and derived from (mostly) reading or movies -- entirely believable in terms of the story.  It's like an excellent pocket watch that circumscribes a virtual world, then takes the back off to show the springs and cogs moving the plot along.  We know what will happen, but not quite how, so the puzzle proceeds.

As an example, I’ll just discuss the latest short story, though they all meet the same criteria.  “Chase Holman” is a boy who makes miniature lead soldiers.  He’s kidnapped and the narrator, a trapper named Edward Joseph Dundeen (“Edjo”) who is a Highlander and therefore a moral man, accidentally passes the kidnappers and their victim on his way to “Juice Slattery’s” place to sell the furs on his packstring of mules.  He says, “Juice’d buy a bucket of old grease from me. . .”  But he doesn't realize he saw a kidnapping.

When he gets to town, he learns about the crime. For the mother’s sake (Grace, wearing yellow, who fainted on learning of it so that she was lying there on her back with “them big yellow you-know-whats prouder’n any mountains we ever knowed."  She's elegant and gracious, maybe like Grace Kelly.)  For her sake as well as the generous reward, Edjo sets out to retrieve the boy.  That boy, even when rolled up in a rug and draped over a horse, had the presence of mind to drop one little lead soldier at a time for clues, each little soldier with a personality and role of its own so they become characters in the story.  At the end point, he drops two together outside the hideout of the kidnappers.  The subtext of the story -- which like all Tom's stories creates a virtual world complete in itself -- is the lead soldiers creating a strategy of miniature not-quite-scouts, a virtual world inside the author's world.

Edjo’s mind is on pie.  He says the boy will be back “in his Mom’s kitchen in a matter of hours, having three-minute eggs or a day-long soup off the back end of her stove, sure as shooting.”  Just before the shooting begins, the boy pretends to drop one last little figure and kneels to pick it up, giving Edjo a clear shot at the bad guys. “It was sweet and smooth as eating lemon meringue pie.”

Maybe the best way to explain the poems is to just include one:

The Tom Sheehan Family

BURIAL FOR HORSEMEN

(For my father, blind too early.)

The night we listened to an Oglala

life on records, and shadows remembered

their routes up the railed stairway like

a prairie presence, I stood at your bed

counting the days you had conquered.

The bottlecap moon clattered into your

room in vagrant pieces . . . jagged blades

needing strop or wheel for stabbing.

great spearhead chips pale in falling,

necks of smashed jars rasbora bright,

thin flaked edges tossing off the sun.

Under burden of the dread collection,

you sighed and turned in quilted repose

and rolled your hand in mine, searching

for lighting only found in your memory.

In moon’s toss I saw the network of your

brain struggling for my face the way you

last saw it, a piece of light falling under

the hooves of a thousand horse ponies,

night campsites riding upward in flames,

the skyline coming legendary.

http://sassafrasmag.wordpress.com/category/issue-3/page/2/  is one place to find “Born to Wear the Rags of War” -- difficult to find a better poem for Memorial Day.  It is printed as prose, but is surely poetry celebrating companions -- more than that -- blood brothers in the Korean War, each wearing the rags of war as they rest together where their various "fathers’ sperm has flung them" to defend a motley but beloved nation.  All Souls Day is November 2.

http://www.milspeak.org/Tom%20Rare.htm  is the location of more poems and insightful comment on them by Laurel Johnson of the Midwest Book Review.  Tom’s dignity, bonded friendships, grand sweep of history interacting with geology, love of strategy, and homely metaphors are appreciated by women in a way that other war poetry is not.  He has a classical mind, tenderly marching through the generations, seeing that he is a link between his father and his sons.

And then there’s this:

“A few years ago we borrowed $60K from a local bank to print a book not yet written. Ten pals each signed a $6k note. It was a book about our hometown, how we wanted to keep what was escaping us, the memories, the fragile memories. We paid the bank off in five months. We sold 2500 copies at $42 each and have a self-sustaining account for scholarships for Saugus High School students. Four kids have been helped in college. It's the John Burns Millennium Book Associates Scholarship. John is 89 years old and was coeditor with me; he was an English teacher in the Saugus school system for 63 years and I know hundreds of people who say he was the best teacher they had at any level. And we wanted to keep our memories intact. The book was called, A Gathering of Memories, Saugus 1900-2000 .”

This is a way of life that has somehow slipped away, or maybe it’s just that our attention has been diverted by school shootings and football players who are rapists.  People in this Saugus life have histories that go way back, know the big sweeping foundational literary works that Europeans and Americans used to share with pride, and use their rather abundant personal resources to celebrate their heroes.  

But I snapped at Tom when he sent more poems, signing off with the advice to “enjoy.”  “Enjoy” is for pie.  This work is not bakery goods: not sweet, not consumable, not for easy praise, though he admits he’s a “praise eater” who hopes to be told it’s good work and will even go out of his way to find someone (like me) who thinks heroes are good, old friends are a worthy subject, and Massachusetts is a place to live and celebrate.  They make movies about such lives with grand old actors -- Paul Newman or Clint Eastwood -- playing the lead but they are never supposed to be poets.  “Thirty-five years at Raytheon Corporation as a writer and analyst” with occasional forays into the wild world of the West or even his family roots in Ireland is a life I can’t even imagine.    Well, I can -- but I imagined it was gone since we're long since past the Fifties.  

http://www.inkpots.net/Interviews/Sheehan.html  My hopscotch jobs and aborted careers don’t add up to anything vaguely like Tom’s world, but somehow we meet in print and in an appreciation of this tumbling, story-generating planet.  It’s not a matter of enjoyment because sometimes it’s a racking pain nearly unsurvivable.  Tom doesn’t deny that, meets it with dignity, family, and fine words.  That's praiseworthy.  But would Robert Frost say, "Enjoy?"

Saugus, Massachussetts