Issue 1
Table of Contents
Contest Winners and Finalists
Poetry
Fiction
Creative Nonfiction
Bios

Authors
Elizabeth R. Curry Poetry Contest Winners
Howard W. Robertson
Paula Lambert
Alan Peterson
John Fitzpatrick
Allison Joseph
Evelyn Ibarra

Creative Nonfiction Contest Winners
Cara Ford
Dorothy Blackcrow Mack
Judith Scheffler
Yuliana M. Kim-Grant



First Place, Howard W. Robertson
The life of trees, birds, and stones


Second Place, Paula Lambert
Bees

—for Bessie and Doug

A beekeeper, gone blind, she could smell disease
and the Queen. The woodworker, a bit arthritic,

learned about bees from her, every sting a cure.
When she died, he crafted a box for her ashes

and was asked to execute her will. She'd left money
in books, thousands of dollars between pages he blew

with an air hose, the compressor thumping the floor.
He thought of her often as he handled the bees and

one day, pulling a comb from a hive and trembling,
he thought of an uncle he used to bring to the doctor—

he'd sat next to him as the doctor explained and
the old man shook. The woodworker's tremor is new,

and is not fear. The bees are calm, but he's aware
of the smell she taught him: it is not the Queen.



Third Place, Alan Peterson
Poets and Criminals

The ear is there with its ranch apparatus
listening while shoeing
and eyes that saved an image of the murderer
till they shot them out
These are beliefs of poets and criminals
and we are a hardened lot
Though the fear of discovery persists
we listen to ingots cooling
and time them with our watches and fret
till the horses forgive us

Runner Up, John Fitzpatrick
Leaf Falling

-gratitude to e.e. cummings

When does a leaf decide to fall,
to let go the branch
that has cradled it
and kept it steady in the rocking of the wind.

When does it release its hold
still full of color,
spotted perhaps with the malady of its own demise,
to go fluttering downward
into the valley beyond
where grounded
it shrivels itself into brown crisps
as cereal to the dentured earth
soon to be covered with fruit of the fall flowering
and absorbed into the nourishment
of the source from which it comes.

Yes, when does a leaf pluck itself
from the food of its sustenance
as a person does

_____when in the silence of the heart,
_____there is no more yearning to live
_____nor are there dreams of anything else to be desired --

and that person, too,

_____totters slowly, softly, silently
_____into the distant field
_____and folds the self into earth
_____to be covered with the white sheets of the winter snow.

Runner Up, Allison Joseph
Fish Crow

after the work of John James Audubon

You are the only black bird
not subject to threats and hatred,
not ridiculed, or so said Audubon
in 1860, labeling you “perfectly
inoffensive,” despite your lively
motion, ceaseless chatter. I thought
that crows meant death, never
knew the difference between you
and a raven, both shiny-black, claws
gnarled as if arthritic. You haunt
the water, glide over lakes, rivers,
shore bird scavenging crabs
for the sweet meal inside. You come
seasonally, summer along the
Mississippi and Ohio , down south in
Illinois where, like everyone else here,
you live frugally and hope to hold
onto to what you can afford—your spot
by the shore, the chill of the dirty waves.
Black wings, keen beady eyes, what
do you hide under the span of your
oily feathers, what feeds you but this land,
these marshes, the rivers' humid, pungent breath?

Runner Up, Evelyn Ibarra
Providence

His wife says he can't sleep at night they tell him to walk to the right
or the left but he always comes home with the cuffs wet and
sometimes up to the knees fortunately he wears slippers but he doesn't
know why. There was a picture of him in the book loose it fell to the
ground he stared up as if it were taken at a booth in a train station but
the curtain was lacy he hadn't blinked for a long time white hair hadn't
receded nor the smile. His wife says he can't sleep at night he wakes
up saying there is a man sitting at the foot of the bed he remembers her
but not the eight children not the children's children when he sees you
he says you're fat and you eat too much you laugh and wonder where
your father has gone, into which closet.


First Place, Cara Ford
Gravity, the Pull

I'm walking in a straight line, one foot in front of the other, toe-to-heel, not paying attention to the suspended band of river to my side. It's sticky-hot July and the Mississippi smells like dead fish and oil. Or at least what I perceive oil to smell like, the same smell of the greasy coveralls my grandfather leaves hanging on a silver hook in the basement bathroom of his house for the thirty-one years he spends working at an oil refinery not far from where we are now, grazing the shores of the mighty Mississippi on the Illinois side.

“That's Missoura,” he points toward the strip of gray clay and green trees on the other side of the river. A barge saunters through the middle, breaking the calm and inspiring my eight-year-old self.

“Look. I'm walking on a tightrope,” my arms stretch outward, parallel the gravel beneath me. Grandpa's eyes lock somewhere beyond the river.

“I used to come here after work.” His voice is as calm as the water, his body still and slightly bent in the permanent way that signals years of moving-yet-not. I trace his gaze to a white tubular formation puffing out smoke, a bright yellow seashell outlined in red, S-H-E-L-L spelled out on top. We're standing by what he calls a look-out tower, a wooden clubhouse full of cursive-marker-phrases like Jenny hearts Steve and Mrs. Callahan is a f-ing bitch , a tree-house without the tree.

“How come you don't work anymore?”

I've stopped walking like a circus-girl, sit down cross-legged on a tree stump. Grandpa bends his neck, rolls around his head, reaches his arms to the haze of sky above us.

“I'm retir'd.”

It sounds like he's saying “retarded,” and a smile breaks the seriousness of my face.

“If you're retir'd then how come you can still drive?”

The corners of his mouth bow upward in a familiar way. This is the Grandpa I love, the Grandpa I never want to die. I want him to take off his sunglasses so I can see his eyes, just to make sure they're winking behind the mirrors. He keeps them on and nods his head.

“Retir'd people can do a lot of things.”

When he squats his knees crack. He plucks a stone from the gravel with one hand, smoothes it with the other. Soon the stone becomes a victim of velocity and gravity, skipping across the glass-top of river, a series of ripples trailing outward.

Before I have a chance to ask he tells me:

“The smoother the stone the easier the skip.”

This sounds like an equation to me. I ignore the science of it all, focus on the image instead.

***

My mother compiles a collage for Grandpa's seventieth birthday, a pastiche of photos with each of his thirteen grandchildren. In my picture I am no older than two, wearing a white dress with a heart embroidered on the sleeve, my blonde hair in pigtails decorated with pink bows. Grandpa towers six feet above me. My hand stretches toward the sky, intercepted by his giant callused palm.

We're strolling along the sidewalk, past the ancient elm tree that lines the entrance to my parents' narrow driveway. In my lifetime at least three cars will lose paint to its greedy branches in a failed attempt at entering. My brother will back into it and shatter the taillight of his new Ford Contour, two days after he buys it with money saved from a summer of mowing lawns and cleaning toilets. At the time of the photograph I do not yet have a brother, nor do I have any knowledge of trees as obstacles for moving vehicles. All I have is the assurance of my grandfather's hand, which is perfectly fine with me.

***

I break the lever that makes the bottom of the chair go up and out, a place to rest your feet. Grandpa bought this chair when he retired from Shell in '85. He also bought the TV, the one with color and a remote control that he would place on the table next to his chair, the table with the built-in lamp that you can turn on and off with your fingertips.

I find myself here in the thick August air that smells like sycamores and burning garbage, the lingering odor of things on fire. I'm eighteen and my head feels like it's on fire, sometimes, and every once-in-awhile I drive five hours south from Chicago down I-55 and pull off at the Alton exit. I can see the faint ribbon of the Saint Louis Arch from the corner of their block, a bluff hovering over the Mississippi . This is when I start to breathe normal.

The TV blinks across the room, short-wave radio static making it hard to decipher what's really going on. It's eleven at night and I'm sitting on the davenport, tracing patterns into the ceiling grooves. The Cardinals resumed playing after a minor rain delay. It's typical this time of year for a storm to blow through unannounced. Two hours prior I leave the back porch and head for the basement as soon as the sky starts blinking and the wind pushing in the screens smells like electricity and fog. Grandpa stays put in his lawn chair and thinks about things, not anything in particular, he assures me, just things he feels like thinking about.

On the screen there appears to be a fight in the dugout. Red baseball caps fly off shaved heads and land on the dirt. The TV's on mute, but a chubby guy with a beard and a mean look on his face death-grips a baseball bat and throws himself at the ref. His knuckles are blue and his eyes look ready to pop out of his head and onto home plate. Grandpa turns a knob on the radio and we listen to the players, watch their mouths rubber-band-snap on the television screen: He wasn't safe, not a chance in Hell. Anyone with eyes knows the truth.

Grandpa sits with his head against the headrest, chuckling. He's not a diehard Cardinals fan, preferring the Dodgers when they were in Brooklyn . Preferences aside, he insists on his loyalty to a city that's given him work all these years, a city that gave him a fair shot at the American Dream. A city that got him out of Saint Genevieve, out of unlocked cellars and open windows. Out of Missouri altogether, a river splitting his past and his present into separate but equal parts.

***

Down the street from Grandpa's house there's a soda fountain called Honke's. We walk there for root beer floats every day that I visit. Grandpa doesn't say much, and when he does talk people listen. I ask him:

“Why are there two water fountains: one here and one over there?”

He pauses for a moment. And then:

“People like to have choices. If you were sitting over there you could use that one. But you're sitting here, and this one is closer.”

“Which one is better?”

“There is no such thing as better. Just different.”

We look at each other for a long time. Grandpa burps quietly into his napkin and winks at the gal behind the counter. She smiles and folds her towel. He doesn't tell me he's leaving, just stands up. I follow him down the alley. We take turns kicking a chunk of gravel the whole walk home.

***

The only reason I care about baseball is because he does. That's what I worry about most when the doctor tells us time is running out.

“He'll still be able to watch TV, right? His room will have a television?”

The doctor tells me yes, of course, all patients have access to television.

“He won't have to share it with anyone, will he? He likes to turn off the sound and listen to the radio instead. With baseball.”

The doctor shifts his shoulders in a way that makes me think I said too much.

“No. He'll have his own room.”

The last time I see him breathing is when the Cubs beat the Cardinals in extra innings. His feet are propped on a chair. We don't say much. I know he doesn't mind the oxygen tank hissing in the background, making it difficult to talk but easy to listen.

***

The dream is always the same: I'm standing on the edge of a cliff overlooking a river, wanting to jump but knowing that it would hurt more than not, and I don't like pain. Even though this is a dream, it feels real. It especially feels real when I'm twenty years old and my nonsmoker grandfather dies of lung cancer in a tiny hospital room in Alton , Illinois , at 8:23 a.m. on a gray day in February. It's not gray at 8:30 a.m. in Chicago when my mother calls to tell us the news, and I hang up twice because although I love words, my brain doesn't want to register the way my life is about to change. I don't want to understand why a sliver of sunlight cuts through the blinds in my childhood bedroom and forces me to sit up and face another day of what-happens-next.

What-happens-next is that my father and brother and sister and I drive five hours south on I-55 without saying a word. Only clicking cassettes in and out of the tape player, silently wondering what it means to be a Gold Dust Woman and Piano Man and not really caring about the silos rushing past in the distance. Eyes focused on the end of a highway that is ninety miles south of Springfield , too close to the truth of a past I want to remember with fondness. Want to remember the lemonade and candy bars and sycamore trees that I swore I could climb once I turned eighteen. He was seventy-nine and never climbed the trees. And I never questioned him, keeping in mind the twisted arthritic pinky and how I prayed on every rosary that he would live forever, that he would become an exception to every rule about life leading to death, and death leading to who-knows-what.

Who-knows-what is what the doctor says when you ask him whether or not there'll ever be a cure for cancer. Cousin Lea is matter-of-fact when discussing the matter. She sells pharmaceuticals for a distributor in Omaha where she's lived for the past four years. Her area of expertise is the prostate. Lea passes out peach-colored stress relievers in the form of a prostate, which oddly resembles the shape of the fruit itself.

“The key to beating cancer is prevention.” She speaks with assurance. I desperately want to believe her, but know it's too late.

***

I don't remember how I got here, except two days ago I was back at school with a grandfather who was still alive. Another town, another river.

The Saint Joseph River cuts through South Bend , Indiana , tucked in a mesh of trees and poorly-paved roads that kick up gravel, nick the belly of your car. In a moment of frustration common for those who don't want to think of what-happens-next I leave the campus where I study history and culture and trot toward a tangle of trees creeping out through the tidy cornfields that line the campus perimeter. A yellow arrow, carved into a weather-beaten wooden plaque attached to a chain-link fence marked: DO NOT ENTER directs me toward the Saint Mary's College Nature Trail, which closes at sundown.

It's dusk this first time I set foot on the path marked by tractor imprints and deer hooves. The sun illuminates the trees so they resemble a watercolor painting hung under the spotlight in a museum. The air is unusually calm, the only noise bouncing off the trees a magnified shrill of a cheerful cardinal. Cardinals remind me of Grandpa, who told me in between hits of oxygen from a metallic tank leaning against the frame of his blue-striped lawn chair, that if he had any say in the matter he'd ask God to reincarnate him as a cardinal. I imagine him floating in a galaxy of white, mouthing his request to a fog of bright light, his soul morphing into the shape of a bird.

My laugh flies out of my mouth without any form of control or thought at the absurdity of his request. The walnut branches shade us from the hot Midwest sun, rustle in time with the oxygen. Calculated and predictable, just like the three-month timeline.

I have always been put off by timelines, the straightforward visual aid in predictability. I feel the same way about pie charts and bell curves—who cares what numbers looks like? The fact is, most people care what things look like, even blind people. So when he tells me that the medicine makes it hard for him to focus, and could I please describe what it looks like out the window, I spare no detail: The sun is setting over the river. The sky is blue, hot pink, purple in the middle. The lights on the bridge are on; a few drivers turned on their headlights.

“Are there any trees?”

“A few, by the river. But not outside the window.”

We're in a sterile white room in the hospital across the street from his house. The view from here is similar to the view from his bedroom window, only slightly more west. There's a difference, he assures me.

If I close my eyes and listen to his voice I am able to block out the tank's rhythmic hiss, dismissing it as a clunker Chevy burping its way along the alley, or a helicopter landing on the hospital roof.

“It all comes down to gravity in the end. The ball has to land somewhere.”

Since the morphine his sentences don't always make sense.

“I understand, Grandpa. I know exactly what you mean.”

Second Place, Dorothy Blackcrow Mack
How I Ruined My Reputation on the Res

First I have to explain that I had a good rep to lose, unlike most whites who come to the res and leave:

I didn't dye my hair black.

I didn't wear fringed leather jackets or beaded jewelry.

I didn't bring a camera or tape recorder.

I didn't ask to sundance.

I kept my mouth shut.

Moved into a one-room log cabin with no electricity or running water – in winter.

Wore rummage clothes like my sisters-in-law, cowboy boots because of rattlers.

Didn't get spooked by Spirit People wandering the sundance grounds at night.

Sent my kids to Crazy Horse School , not the white school off-reservation.

Butchered beef, washed out the guts for tanigha by hand in the creek .

Fed people. Served the old gents coffee.

Drove away drunks with a broom.

Kept my mouth shut.

After my husband Selo divorced me in Tribal Court , the relatives came to me and said, “Well, cuz, maybe Selo divorced you, but we didn't! You're still one of us!”

I was moved. Even though the buffalo, who had been named like children, would be sold and the sacred herd dispersed, this meant that I still had family. Nieces and nephews, all the takojas, and my cluster of sisters- and cousins-in-law, sundancers and women's sweat lodge circle. I still had m y tiyospaya , my extended family, and my reputation, more precious and ephemeral than any material possession.

Too bad I had to leave Camp Lakota, the land I loved -- the 800 acres of prairie we'd fenced off for the buffalo, the sundance grounds down by the creek near Old Lady Coldwater's spring, and high on the hill overlooking Redstone Basin, the vision pits and the small circle of graves where I'd expected to be buried.

A woman from Taos was encamped in my living room. My replacement. Her name was Julie Hole. I called her Julie Whore. She had two breasts to my one, and believed everything Selo told her. My sisters-in-law asked me if I wanted them to gang her, drive her off the res. Kind of them, but I knew she wouldn't stay. She wasn't the type to chop wood. She'd take Selo to Taos by wintertime.

“No,” I said, “I won‘t fight for a man. No man's worth it.” His newest woman wasn't the problem, just the final diversion. The Sacred Pipe and alcohol don't mix. The Sacred Pipe and alcohol are a fatal combination.

So Selo got a restraining order from tribal court to evict me from Camp Lakota . But because the relatives respected me, he couldn't get me evicted from the reservation itself, where I still taught at Oglala Lakota College .

Indian way, the oldest brother is responsible for taking in a younger brother's widow, or in these days, a divorcee. But Selo's brother Milo , an artist with ten children, lived off-res in Lakota Homes in Rapid City . He had no room and I had no desire to live away from the land.

Instead, I moved across the res. Another medicine man, Rick Two Dogs, offered me a log cabin out in the Porcupine hills if I would watch over his sundance grounds. This cabin without electricity or running water at least had an iron hand pump. Rick knew that no one but a crazy white woman, like me, the famous Broom Lady, would live in these remote hills full of coyote and cougar and Wounded Knee ghosts. But in exchange, I would come under the protection of the Two Dogs/Iron Cloud Clan. I would be safe from human marauders, able to enjoy the sound of the wind in the pines, and the silence.

One day a young guy came over the pine hills and offered to chop me some firewood. He chopped firewood. He was strong. He broke the ax handle. He stayed to fix it. He became my lover.

Perhaps it was the cougar screams at night echoing from the nearest hill, as if from a tormented woman. Perhaps it was the fire of a man beside me during cold nights.

Perhaps it was the raccoons on the roof, tick-tick-skittering over the shakes till dawn. Perhaps it was the smooth sex, making love in the dark with my missing breast unnoticed.

Perhaps it was the giant hands, wrapping completely around my waist, that made me feel like a schoolgirl again, his large hands laying me down, his magic fingers stroking my hairs. Perhaps it was the shadow of Leonard Peltier, who'd maybe slept in this cabin while fleeing the FBI, now rotting in prison for a crime he didn't commit.

Perhaps it was the hunger of lone wolves at bay, lone wolves outside the pack. Our affair began remote and private. But every night he'd walk in two miles over the dark hills to my low-lit lamp.

In the daylight he looked like Lou Diamond Phillips playing Johnny Night-Train Moncrieff in Courage Under Fire, with his angular jaw and cheekbones, low sloping forehead, wide hairless face. He didn't agree because they'd called him Monkeyface and Apeman at school. I thought he was handsome, but we didn't call each other anything.

Reticent. He didn't talk all the time, like Selo. He didn't stink of sicky-sweet wine, like Selo. Because his father was the local bootlegger, he didn't drink. He didn't go to school. He didn't work. Wouldn't talk Lakota with me, even though it was his first language. Wouldn't tell me his Indian name, his age, wouldn't tell me his story. Put a hand over my mouth so I wouldn't talk while we made love. A strange one. Reticent.

In the privacy of motels in midwinter, I began to learn parts of his story. Behind the anonymous locked doors, in the deluge of hot showers and steaming tubs, and afterwards, wrapped in thick towels, his tautness loosened. He was alert, intelligent, more canny than me – a survivor. Smart enough to test out of GED, smart enough to go AWOL from the marines rather than rot in their brig. Lone wolves don't like rules, cages, traps.

One day he wanted to go to K-Mart. He told me he loved K-Mart. Everyone I knew loved K-Mart, the off-res Indian meeting place. Even the little old Lakota ladies who didn't speak English went there. So I couldn't figure him out. Why would he want to go where for sure we'd be seen, when he didn't want us to be seen together? “We won't go in together,” he said, “and with so many skins around, they'll never notice me.” So?

So we went into K-Mart, separately. I didn't need anything, didn't want anything, didn't buy anything. I'm not a shopper. I don't like to wander around and look. But I met him half an hour later, just beyond the check-out counters.

He grinned and put his arm around my shoulder. We went out to the car. From his pants pockets, shirt pockets, coat pockets, from beneath his sweater, his briefs, from his boots, loot flowed onto the seat of the car: CDs, tapes, batteries, computer chips and discs, perfume and lipstick and nail polish, pens, notepads, tiny trucks, squeeze ducks, small stuffed Dalmatians… Kleptomania.

The lure of K-Mart: a klepto's paradise. He had gigantic hands, the hands of a basketball center, able to grip the ball with one hand. Sleight-of-hands, slick and invisible, moving with the artistry of a klepto to pocket small items without any bulges in jeans or T-shirt. A magician. I was amazed. Appalled. Fascinated. I refused his pilfered gifts.

He was stunned. He'd put on the whole show for me. “You asked me what I do. Now I just showed you. I steal without getting caught.”

I began to study kleptomania. Was he stealing from a sense of loss, an attempt to fill up an inner emptiness? Was he, like one of my nieces, sexually abused as a child? Was he challenging white authority while playing Bad Boy? Was it the thrill, the excitement of the forbidden? Did he caress the CDs as he caressed my breast? Was I stolen, too?

Was there such a thing as an honorable kleptomania? He was proud of his secret calling, felt he was an Indian Robin Hood, righting wrongs and redistributing goods. He had a code: steal for the Great Sioux Nation. Steal back what was stolen by the invaders. Steal from the rich and give to the poor. Steal from the whites and give to the Indians. Keep nothing.

He and a buddy would go to cities in the height of AIM power, AIM resistance, and in the pandemonium of the protests, they'd stride into the natural history or art museums and “liberate” sacred objects of the Great Sioux Nation – pipes, pipe bags, medicine bundles, ghost dance shirts, sundance shields -- and return them to their medicine families on the res. Only once had he been caught and sent to prison. “Never again,” he said, “I'd rather die.”

So he asked me to keep him out of K-Mart. He'd never been caught there, and he wanted to keep it that way. It'd be shameful to go down for lifting CDs, even Indian CDs like Floyd Westerman and Buddy Red Bow.

Also, he felt it his duty to steal from dishonorable Indians who treated others badly. One evening he hitchhiked all the way to Wanblee to take sweat with the men at Camp Lakota . Afterwards, all Selo's silver-and-turquoise Navajo jewelry that had been left outside on the altar was gone, taken by the Spirit People or “that goddam thieving kid watching the door.” He told me all about it, but this time showed me none of his loot.

He never stole from me. Not things, anyway. He probably protected me from being ripped off, more than I would ever realize. He was an enemy to be reckoned with, one who could use sneaky guerrilla tactics to get even.

Then one spring day I discovered my red and black Blazer was gone from the college parking lot. I guessed he'd taken it without asking. Sure enough, he returned by evening, gone to Nebraska and back, spaced out.

That's how I found out he was a user. His substance was coke and crack. And just like his father, he'd become a supplier – for the Great Sioux Nation. Focused on alcohol, I'd missed his symptoms – sore nose, bleeding, hunger, lassitude, nervous agitation, obsession. I felt stupid, betrayed, ashamed. I tried to extricate myself immediately.

Too late. Everyone knew but me. They'd known for months. My relatives. My students. My college center boss. I heard that even Selo in Taos knew. The res with its “moccasin telegraph” is merciless on privacy. Almost overnight my reputation was gone, shot-to-hell over a relationship gotten out-of-hand. I, an older woman who ought to have known better, was sleeping with a younger man, and worse, a Sticky Hands shunned by all. An uncommon thief, but no Robin Hood now. A destroyer of the People.

I moved off-res to a white rancher town, out of Indian country. Though I was cut off from my community, my relatives, and my friends, I felt it was worth being far away, someplace with no reputation. How naïve. I'd forgotten that here I'd been known for years as Selo's squaw.

Now, a dozen years later, it would break my heart to go back to the res. To see my old home Camp Lakota all run down, the corral and fences gone, the sundance grounds full of weeds, the vision pits caved in, the sacred herd merely a dream.

Third Place, Judith Scheffler
The Mad Whittler

Rodney Richard has whittled over 23,000 bunnies, each the size of half a thumb. He gives the tiny wooden animals to members of the female sex who promise to use ten minutes of their day to do something nice for someone. Rodney's Bunny Club includes Olympia Snowe from his own state of Maine , Barbara Bush, Hillary Clinton and Tipper Gore. Nancy Reagan wrote to him on White House stationery to thank him for her bunny. Picabo Street and other top skiers became members when Rodney whipped out his pocketknife, and barely looking at his hands, whittled them bunnies during the U.S. Alpine Championship races.

Rodney's signature carving is a black bear about a foot high, standing on all fours. Coveting the much larger black bear he carved into a broken-off tree trunk in front of a restaurant down the road from our cabin, I decided that I'd also love the little guy that looks like he's nonchalantly walking through the woods. One day I parked my car in his gravel driveway in Rangeley and sat there a while, looking up into the maple above me to examine the full-size carving of a black bear chasing a worried man in blue jeans and a bright red shirt into the tree's green leaves which were already edged in red. The temperature was in the fifties. Just up the hill on the other side of the drive, a log cabin sported a large carved sign saying THE MAD WHITTLER. Unfortunately, the shop was closed. I got out of the car, looked across Main Street at the lapis blue waves on Rangeley Lake , then walked further up the hill and knocked on the door of the small white clapboard house.

Rodney's wife Lillian, small and thin, opened the door and greeted me.

“Can I talk to Rodney about buying one of his bears?” I asked.

“Come on in and sit a while,” she responded and then trotted somewhere into a back room to find him.

Seated in a soft low point on the sofa, I gazed at a shelf where five wooden towers were lined up.

“My dad taught me how to carve those towers,” Rodney said as he sat down next to me. “When I was a boy living in Phillips, just twenty miles down the road, flappers and their families still stopped at the railroad station on their way to the Western Mountain resorts. I went to see the last narrow gauge train leave town.”

“We had a vegetable garden, a pig, and a cow,” Rodney added. “My dad was a woodsman. He mostly carved what he needed – an axe handle or a bucksaw frame. I was a little shaver, about seven, when dad taught me how to make a wooden whistle. During the depression and prohibition, Dad made home-brewed beer and chokecherry wine. He got caught selling it and ended up in the county jail for a while. Another Canadian there taught him how to whittle a block of straight-grained cedar into those fan towers.”

Lillian, sitting in an upholstered chair next to us, caught my quizzical expression as I gazed at a one-piece wooden tower, encased by two fans, each with twenty-five spokes, reminding me of a penny in a bottle with a tiny opening I once saw – you couldn't figure out how the whittler carved the tower inside the fans.

“He starts with the tower,” Lillian explained. “The dimensions have to be perfect.”

“My dad carved the two on the left,” Rodney told me. “The other three are mine. We never measured anything. An engineer with calipers once told me he thought that was impossible.” Rodney smiled, clearly pleased at the memory.

“I started working in the woods in my teens,” the white-haired man, plumper than his wife, leaned back and talked as if he had an audience. He certainly held my attention. Even Lillian's rapt face shone beneath her smooth white hair as if she were listening to a new and exciting tale. “One year my logging responsibility was to ‘pick up the rear' by throwing logs left on a hillside into the river with the masses of wood being floated to the mills. It was hard work for little money.” Rodney didn't drop his R's like many people born in Maine , but he talked slowly and paused between sentences. “When I graduated from high school, I had the cash to buy my first chainsaw – a forty-pound IEL with a hand clutch,” he continued. “I began cutting my own logs, using ‘twitch' horses trained to pull the logs out of the woods. Six years later, I purchased a John Deere tractor — it didn't have to be fed and cared for on weekends,” Rodney added, smiling.

Rodney saw an opportunity in the 1950s when river drives of logs were outlawed for environmental reasons. “I moved to Rangeley,” he said, “got myself a dump truck and started a gravel and sand business. While I worked, I thought about how much logging had changed just in my lifetime. It bothered me that the old equipment was being thrown in the junk pile.”

“One day a foreman of the Brown Paper Company pointed to an old snubbing machine,” Rodney continued. “It was a strange contraption with steel cable wound around drums. Loggers used to anchor the machine to a tree, hitch the cable to a horse-drawn sled, and let the cable out slowly to keep the sled, which carried tons of wood, from getting away from the horse and running away down a snowy mountain. ‘Push that damn snubber over the bank and get it out of the way,' the foreman told me. Instead I took it home with me. I'd started collecting artifacts.”

Rodney and his wife were also collecting boys, three of them. “One weekend I joined my boys on a Boy Scout camp-out,” he said. “Those scouts became unmanageable. The scoutmaster was worried someone would get hurt. I got the chainsaw out of my truck. A big spruce had blown down, and I started working on it. The boys were mesmerized. It took more than an hour, but when I'd finished I'd carved a beaver – all I had to do was picture it in my mind.”

I told Rodney that I'd seen a display of the miniature woodmen he'd carved. Beaming, Lillian got up from her chair, fetched and opened a rectangular black briefcase. Inside, wooden crossbars separated ten, five-inch-high, carved woodsmen, each performing a different chore. “This is my favorite,” Rodney said, as he carefully picked up a carving of a man holding a bucksaw. He touched the teeth of the saw, then ran his fingers down an intricately carved thin strand of wound rope. “The woodsman turned that rope to tighten his tool,” he explained.

“I sent a picture of these woodsmen along with an application to the University of Maine 's Juried Artist Program. I didn't get in that year, but a field worker from the Smithsonian arrived, scouting for their Exhibition of American Folk Art. That university man — what was his name, Lillian? — told the field worker, ‘I got just what you're looking for.' My woodsmen and I were invited to Smithsonian's '76 exhibition.” Rodney slapped his knee and grinned. “While I was there, I borrowed a chainsaw and turned a stump into a logger. My miniature woodsmen toured the country in two Smithsonian traveling exhibitions, and the big guy went to a logging museum in Pennsylvania .”

Becoming an established folk artist didn't slow Rodney down. In 1979 he convinced six other people in town to form a non-profit organization to maintain the history of logging in Western Maine . A year later, during the height of Rangeley's tourist season, the organization held a Logging Festival on Rodney's sloping front lawn. His collected artifacts and a forestry demonstration drew a small crowd, who paid for tickets to eat like the loggers had in the early 1900s. Beans were baked for twelve hours in an underground hole and biscuits were cooked in camp-style reflector ovens by open flames. Local women provided handmade sweaters and quilts to be auctioned. The meager profits were banked and the organization continued holding the festival each July. In ten years they paid Georgia Pacific $200 an acre for eighteen acres of land on a country road above downtown Rangeley.

The full-time population of Rangeley is three thousand. One day I walked into the drugstore and asked the lady behind the counter if I could borrow a telephone book to find the address of a local man.

“Who are you looking for?” she asked.

“Dave Burgess,” I answered.

“Oh, he lives right up Pleasant Street in the yellow house on the left. He's new in town, only been here four years.”

During most months, the few men in town wear high-laced or rubber boots and do U-ees on Main Street in their pick-ups, and the women, dressed in baggy warm jackets, shop purposefully, and nod their hellos. In the summer most of the people are wearing sports clothes, inns and hotels hang NO VACANCY signs and you can't find a parking place. As July, 1989 approached, Rodney worried. He wanted to have the Logging Festival on their new land, but didn't know how he'd get summer people, who usually stayed in town, to travel the one mile to the lot up the hill.

Lillian solved the problem. “Let's have a parade,” she suggested. When the day came, Little Miss and Mister Woodchip were named. Floats were built. Logging trucks, washed and polished, got in line. People followed the parade to the new property.

Rodney hadn't formed the non-profit just to have a festival each year. He envisioned a Rangeley Lakes Logging Museum , but had no idea where they'd get the funds for a building.

“We held so many sales that we were afraid the lot would become known as the Flea Market instead of the site of the Logging Museum ,” Lillian told me.

“Once we had the land, we got all sorts of companies and people to pitch in,” Rodney continued. “My nephew worked for M&H Logging. With his help, they donated the use of a bulldozer for a few days. We cleared part of the land. Sold the logs and pulpwood.”

Rodney took off on a roll. His eyes gleamed as he remembered the successful negotiations.

“The day that Seven Islands Land Company agreed to donate the lumber we thought a miracle had occurred. Then a guy from White Mountain Lumber said they'd saw the big timber. Stratton Lumber sawed the small pieces. G&L Haley donated the labor to build the first floor. Volunteers put up the big timbers for the second story and boarded up the place. We hired G&L Haley to do the roof. A-1 Builders put down the second floor. A couple of smaller contractors built the stairways. In 1991 people who came to the Logging Festival got to tour the new building.”

Rodney looked up at the mahogany bell-shaped clock on his mantle. “Got to go,” he said. “A tour bus is stopping at the inn. People from Kalamazoo , Michigan , want to see me carve a bear.”

“That's what I came to see you about.” I said. I'd like to buy one of your bears.”

“Don't have one now. Come back tomorrow afternoon,” he told me as he headed out the door.

I had first seen Rodney carve at the summer Logging Festival, now held behind the museum. He knelt down in front of the outdoor stands. Using a chainsaw, Rodney transformed a foot-and-a-half square block of wood into a carving of a black bear. In baggy khakis and a casual white, short-sleeved shirt, leaning forward so that a swatch of yellow-white hair fell over his eyes, he reminded me of pictures I'd seen of Carl Sandburg. In half-an-hour, the animal emerged, looking like a bear cub walking on all fours. The Maine folk artist used his pocketknife to pare fine features, like the eyes, and put his initials on the bottom of one foot.

Rodney stood up and held the bear high above his head. A crowd of about three hundred people clapped.

“I usually sell these for one hundred dollars,” he shouted. What will you bid?”

The bidding started high, quickly reaching $95. A few bidders were left when one guy offered $125, and another one $150.

“I think I'll have to just go over there and whip up another one,” Rodney shouted.

The crowd laughed. One man yelled out, “I'll bid $175.” He got the bear.

Inside the museum I walked around, gazing at nineteen oil paintings painted by Rodney's friend, Alden Grant. Each painting showed a scene Alden remembered from the days in the 1930s when he was a young boy at his grandfather's logging camp. A set of Rodney's hand-carved miniature woodsmen sat in a glass case. Paper company exhibits filled the rest of the room. Back outside, rusted pieces of old logging equipment were arrayed like sculpture in front of the museum.

Bare-chested, well-muscled loggers in jeans competed in events called the Pulp Toss, Ax Toss, Pulp Piling, Dot Split and Stock Saw. The husky stranger sitting next to me in the bleachers leaned forward to watch the competition, his elbows propped on his knees and his hands holding his chin. A long saw sang across the wood as the men competed in the Two-Man Crosscut. The stranger's girlfriend, dressed in blue jeans and a black leather jacket and wearing twenty silver bracelets on one arm, asked, “Why do I get the saw stuck every time we cut logs for the wood stove?”

“It takes a light touch,” said the man, putting his arm around her.

A light touch. That seemed to be Rodney's leadership style. Looking for Rodney in the crowd was like asking, “Where's Waldo?” in those children's books. Though he seemed ordinary and nondescript, you could always spot him. One minute he shook the hands of the winner of an event, the next he clapped a friend on the back, and then he just stood alone, intently watching the competition.

The afternoon after my visit to his home I again pulled my car into the driveway and parked under the maple. The log cabin's door was open. Many years earlier, Rodney had called the owner of the local newspaper. “When you haven't got a darn thing to put in your paper, come on down and interview The Mad Whittler,” he'd said. She did. The name stuck and he'd carved it above the door of his shop. Just inside, I could see Rodney sitting on a chair paring a small piece of wood with his pocketknife.

I thought about how Rodney, somewhere in his mid-eighties, still lives only twenty miles northwest of the place he was born. His boys live and work nearby. He has been exhibited in the Smithsonian, and named one of Maine 's Juried Artists. Once, joining a group from the coast, Rodney visited Archangel, Russia, a town on the White Sea that is Portland's sister city. One hundred miles south of the Arctic Circle , Rodney presented the Russian mayor with a wooden angel and carved a bear and a squirrel with his chainsaw. Tourists at the Maine State Museum in Augusta see his life-size carving of a snowmobile, and those who visit the National Guard Armory in Ashville , North Carolina , view his rendering of a colonial soldier. He carved trophy bears at several United States ski championships and attended Clinton 's inauguration. He loves being founder and president of Rangeley's Logging Museum . His energy makes me wonder why I don't get more accomplished each day.

“I used to be able to finish a bear in half-an-hour,” Rodney sighed as I entered his shop. “Now my back hurts and I have to stop and rest.” He pointed to a shelf in the back. I gave him the check I'd prepared, walked over to the shelf, picked up my pine bear, and held it close. Pieces of fresh sawdust sprinkled down the front of my black jersey, smelling wonderful.

Runner Up, Yuliana M. Kim-Grant
The World Divided--Nigger

I have prepared myself since falling in love with my husband. His predawn runs make me nervous not because I'm afraid he's going to have a heart attack, his body sprawled on the ground, unnoticed by the random passing car, or the early stirrings of each house. Instead it's all the other possibilities that make me hold my breath once I've heard the soft click of the front door. A black man running, in the early morning hours, in our mostly white neighborhood, could be construed in all the wrong ways. We've joked about how he would identify himself to the police, which is more notorious for racial profiling and brutality than for their heroism, in case he ever got pulled over. With his Arms raised, he would give his name and California Bar Association number, to make certain they understood he was a law abiding citizen just out for a morning run.

Despite these heart-stopping scenes of ‘what ifs' for my husband, my worries for him pale, compared to the ones I have for our two year old son. He's still too young to feel the subtle and sometimes not so subtle withdrawal of people, categorizing him with a burden of his color that he may never fully understand. The secret part of me, the part never voiced out loud, is relieved he resembles more of my Korean features. Perhaps his blended looks, despite his brown color, will make him the target of other assumptions, perhaps not. Perhaps the worst he'll suffer is to always be mistaken for the help instead of someone with a more menacing motivation.

My heart doesn't just plummet, but actually stops when I try to imagine the day he comes home in tears. For the first time in his young life, he will see the world divided. This day will, forever, be the demarcation line of before and after. The before would be marked by a blessed naiveté to the cruelties of a world where your color and race is used to demean and dehumanize you, so that in the end, you become a shell of the fearless, confident child you had been. The after would be the rest of his life.

I imagine him hiccupping, as he recounts how his classmate, a boy who had not seemed particularly angry, cruel, or noticeable, had taunted him and then whispered, “Nigger” just loud enough for only my son to hear. Tears streaming down his face, he asks, “Mommy, why?” confusion and heart wrenching pain so commingled in that one question.

When I imagine this scene, my eyes blur instantaneously before rage, of a ferocity which startles me, makes my hands shake. This rage is much more immense than what I had felt when taunted and called, “Chink,” in the first grade. My fury had landed me in the principal's office for, soundly, beating up the name caller. This being the seventies and racial awareness not a high priority I, along with my Korean immigrant dad, was reprimanded. Not the name caller, just me. The principal, unapologetically, told us, “This can't happen in the future.” As painful as that memory was, and is, for me, it will never compare to the experiences my son will face as a black man. Most ethnic minorities will acknowledge the power of that word - Nigger . It is the racial epitaph that out trumps all others. It is a word laden with a history, so ugly and violent, its power to hurt, humiliate, never diminishing with time. Even the current trend, for better or worse, of hip hop culture co-opting the word as part of their vernacular, still does not lessen the painful impact for a black person to be called Nigger.

I know, I will, forever, be haunted by his question of why. But what's worse for me, is acknowledging my own experiential ignorance to the devastation of being so demeaned by one word. It is even more painful when I ask myself whether I am up to the task of being his mother, knowing any and all the consolations I offer are from a place of “I can imagine,” not “I know how that feels.”

My son's school will, I assume, have a vastly different response to the name calling, unlike my own. Shock, like the epicenter of an earthquake, will ripple through our progressive, diverse, tolerant community. I can picture mothers, fathers, and teachers, speaking about the incident in hushed tones, words left dangling in embarrassment and pity, when we are spotted nearby. There will be conferences with the name caller's parents, well meaning people, who are demoralized, in a different way, by their son's racist name calling. Their identity as politically and socially liberal, inclusive, non-judgmental, ecologically aware, and, most certainly, racially tolerant, will be shredded by this event. I wonder if they will have the stomach to ask the hard question about whether these previously held, carefully crafted perceptions were realistic, or merely a mirage, borne, more from rebellion against their parents, than true conviction. If I and my husband, made a big enough fuss, there might even be a school wide symposium on racism, the power of words and names, how to break down stereotypes, defining white privilege.

Outraged friends who stood in solidarity with us would wonder too quickly why we didn't let it go as our fury spiraled, all of the privileges of our class and education being swept up into the vortex of this destructive force; in the end, leveling all of our hard work to safeguard against such experiences. Isn't that why we chose to live in this enclave of privilege and class, where standing out as different, unique, the other, was rationalized in our minds? I suppose, this event, a sledgehammer against our foolish optimism for a world more tolerant and open, is what will be so profoundly painful. All of the calculated decisions we had made picking neighborhoods and schools, and in truth, every aspect of our lives, will seem silly, useless.

In the end, the urge to drive over to the name caller's house armed with a baseball bat will help me feel more in control. I will play and replay images of me, deranged Korean mother, bashing in windows, bushes, maybe even an outdoor cat. It is the only thing that will comfort me as I lay sleepless next to my husband each night. Neither of us capable of dealing with this collective pain of our son's experience, both of us barely able to inure ourselves against our own individual wounds, collected over our lifetimes.

Worse than our anger will be our discomfort as those around us become hyper politically correct. All the casual intimacies, built on countless dinner parties and birthday parties, will be rescinded by this day. Their collective guilt, unfair, in some respects, and not in others, will make all of us acutely aware of the differences we had blithely, so easily ignored before. As our presence becomes a constant burden to the injustices they did not create, they will, gradually, start pulling away. After a while, we will wonder if we shouldn't move to another neighborhood, and school. However, these discussions screech to a dead end, all of the possibilities of this world, shrinking as we realize no new location, school, can erase the color of our skin, the slant of our eyes, darkness of our hair.

In the end, we will cobble together some semblance of normalcy. Friends who had been tentative for months will, finally, reach out gingerly. A few dinner invitations will be extended. Evenings spent, conversations stilted, all of the ugliness of the past few months swirling around us like kites swooping high above. For us as a family, we will resign ourselves to the permanent, lasting role of our son's name-caller to our family history. Ultimately, we will realize his part in our son's education about his racial identity, and the precariousness of it. Sadly, we realize this will certainly not be the last time. Perhaps by the third, fourth, or hundredth incident, we will react less emotionally, less devastated, more matter of fact, just accepting this as a part of our life as a family.