The Servitude of Love

The Servitude of Love

Diane Glancy

The Servitude of Love

Copyright © 2017 Diane Glancy. All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in critical publications or reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publisher. Write: Permissions, Wipf and Stock Publishers, 199 W. 8th Ave., Suite 3, Eugene, OR 97401.

Resource Publications

An Imprint of Wipf and Stock Publishers

199 W. 8th Ave., Suite 3

Eugene, OR 97401

www.wipfandstock.com

paperback isbn: 978-1-5326-1773-7

hardcover isbn: 978-1-4982-4264-6

ebook isbn: 978-1-4982-4263-9

Manufactured in the U.S.A. June 27, 2017

Table of Contents

The Servitude of Love

Acknowledgments

The Man who Said Yellow

Minneola Peavine

The Bird Who Married a Blue Light

Monkey Tree

The Only Oar You Have

Malchas

The Roundness of Earth

The Similitude of Oxen

The Last Indian War in Kansas

The Storm That Loved a Bike

Grady and Gus

Something Called Almost God

The Servitude of Love

Acknowledgments

Grady and Gus

Parcel

Malchas

Cooweescoowee, Rogers State University, Claremore, Oklahoma

Minneola Peavine

Potpourri, a Quarterly Magazine of Literary Arts, 2002 Council on National Literatures Fiction Award

The story of the bat is from a Muskogee story-teller, Joyce Childers Bear, who heard it from her father, Mose Childers. It is recorded as Why Bats Fly at Night, Grandfather Stories, Traditional Cherokee Legends, Gregg Howard, Various Indian Peoples Publishing Company, 1966.

Monkey Tree

Blink Again, an Anthology of Short Fiction, Spout Press

Gratefulness to the Norbert Hill Tribal School, Oneida Nation, Green Bay, Wisconsin, for a first reading, January 13, 2004

The Bird Who Married a Blue Light

Books & Culture

Shorelines, an Award Anthology, Lake Superior Writers, First Place Award with a reading at The Depot, Duluth Minnesota, November 4, 2002

The Last Indian War in Kansas

Front Range Review, Fort Collins, Colorado

Gratefulness to the Kansas Arts Commission for a grant to travel the state, and to the historical markers, each giving their version of history.

The Man Who Said Yellow

Image, A Journal of Art, Faith, Mystery, No. 51, Seattle Pacific University, Seattle, Washington

Not Safe but Good, Vol. 2, edited by Bret Lott, WestBow Press, Nashville, Tennessee

Bearing the Mystery, Twenty Years of Image Journal, edited by Gregory Wolfe, William Eerdsmann Publishers

The Only Oar You Have

Frontiers: A Journal of Women’s Studies, Indigenous Women’s Issue, edited by Inez Hernandez-Avila and Gail Tremblay, Washington State University, for the section, The Moon on Their Breath

Going to the Water, James Wright Festival, September 29, 2000, University of Minnesota, for parts of various sections

American Tableaux, Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, for the section, The Only Oar You Have, with a reading in the Tableaux Series at the Walker, May 5, 2002

Gratefulness to Black Bear Crossing, St. Paul, Minnesota, for a reading from The Moon on Their Breath, February 15, 2001

The Roundness of Earth

Ozone Park Journal

The Servitude of Love

Bloodroot Literary Magazine

The Similitude of Oxen

Many Mountains Moving, with a reading at the Salon Reading Series, St. John’s Episcopal Church, Boulder, Colorado, March 29, 2008

Some of the information in this story was taken from historical markers and various online sites about Kansas history.

The Storm that Loved a Bike

Journal of the Humanities, Indiana University of Pennsylvania

Choices and Options: Interpretations of Ecclesiastes, edited by Anthony Pinn, Wipf and Stock Publishers, Eugene, Oregon

Gratefulness for readings to the Pima Writer’s Workshop, Tucson, Arizona, 2014

The New England Young Writers Conference, Middlebury, Vermont, 2012

The University of Missouri, October 15, 2009

Fiction Collective 2, University of Florida at Tallahassee, March 27, 2006

High Plains Bookfest, Yellowstone Arts Museum, Billings, Montana, July 8, 2004

Cover art: he is the one, Murv Jacob

THE MAN WHO SAID YELLOW

The camel, I had noticed, was passing,

with great difficulty, through the eye

of the needle.

Renata Adler, Brownstone

When a great rumble of evangelism swept Brownsville, it left an unswept place around Noe as he worked in his shed. Noe was the artist, the el artisto, in his family. Others looked at him that way. Uncles. Cousins. Neighbors would come to look in the shed. Strangers who had heard of Noe would peer in while he worked. Often, Noe was unaware of them. His three sons started going to church with his wife. The house was abuzz with what was happening. The family had been Catholic since the Spanish invasion. Now there was an upstart iglesia. A church of their own.

In meetings that lasted into the night some excitement was there. It was said that angels descended and touched toothaches. Bursitis, arthritis, and cysts were healed. A baby who had coughed for days was quiet and asleep.

It was the girls that must have been at church, Noe thought. Otherwise his sons would not have been eager to go. His dreams, ah! That was the origin of art. That was his iglesia. That was his Maker, his El Senor himself—the road of open dreams. It was where he found his yellow fever. His yellow works. Canary. Finch. Yellow jacket. Noe also went to the Laguna Atascosa Wildlife Refuge. The Wetlands of Boca Chica. The Los Ebanos Preserve—for images of the wild birds, insects and small animals of his carvings, some of them surreal.

Did not the Maker speak of dreams in the Book his wife, Hesta, read to him? In a dream, in a vision of the night, he opens the ears of men and seals their instruction—Job 33:15–16. The Maker was the Maker of dreams, and not the dreams themselves. But Noe did not agree and brushed her aside.

Sometime later, there were three weddings. Not all at once, but over the year at the church, after the courtings and dinners and parties with the families, Roberto married Inez Garcia. Domingo married Cornelia Gomez. Dagoberto married Elee Padillo.

At least his sons would not marry the daughters of unbelievers. At least they stayed away from the ungodly, Hesta said.

Now that Noe and Hesta were suddenly alone together, they didn’t know what to do. Noe kept at work in his shed, carving his wooden pieces, painting them, signing them. The curators fought among themselves for his work. Noe showed his pieces and sold them at the Brownsville Heritage Museum, the Art League Museum, Imagene’s Studio, and the Festival Internacional de Otoio in Matamoros across the Mexican border. There had been an article in the Brownsville newspaper about Noe’s birds from the center of the earth. Another article followed about Noe’s Subterranean Cosmos, his ingenious Mythologies of Inner Aviaries. Hesta sent the articles to their relatives who had gone north to Minnesota for work. She sent them to relatives still in Mexico.

Noe’s work shed sat on a hill near his house with its back to the setting sun. Roberto cut a window in the shed for him and let in the evening light. After dark, Noe could work under a lightbulb in a metal reflector that caused the light to burn bright and direct on his work. In the day, when the heat came in the window, Roberto installed a canvas awning.

After several years, no children were born as yet and the three wives grieved. There is a reason, Hesta said.

In Noe’s dreams, animals began to appear two by two. When he told his wife, she was beside herself. Maybe God was getting hold of her husband at last. Maybe now he would go to church with her, just as she hoped. When Noe’s two-by-two dreams continued, Hesta said, Maybe you’ll become a visionary. The end of days must be upon us, she concluded. There is going to be a flood. Make an ark. Gather animals. That’s why there have been no grandchildren.

This isn’t a ship yard, Noe said. "This is the artisto’s shed with a tin corrugated roof"—where the grackles hopped making scratching sounds that seemed at times to direct Noe’s hands.

Then make the ark with a tin roof like your shed.

That night Noe heard camels bellow. Muffled but recognizable coming from the distance. Had he fallen asleep in his shed? Wouldn’t his wife be coming to wake him or call him to bed? How could he tell? Male and female. That’s what they were supposed to do. Multiply. Replenish.

That’s what he did as an artist. Populate the barren world with his art.

Camels. I see camels coming, Noe said again as Hesta took notes. A camel train. They are bearing weight. They are with merchants, or the merchants are with them.

Eventually Noe’s dreams became darker, murkier. Where did his art come from? Though camels were the central theme of his dreams, he also was flooded with images of Mexican cattle, scrawny goats, frogs, lizards, snakes, stray dogs, half-starved horses. In spite of all, he continued work in his shed, three-sided, with the fourth a large door that pushed back so that the front was nearly open to the flat brown hills.

It was as if his dreams, looking into the center of the earth for the birds that flew there, for the animals that burrowed there, had found instead, Hell. What was Hell? What was his definition? His understanding? The absence of dreams and visions? Surely such an important place should have a concept in his mind.

Hell is when you don’t know God, Hesta, his wife, said.

But Noe’s theology was a man’s belief in God. Noe just wasn’t an enthusiastic and evangelistic. Noe knew the Maker, El Senor himself, as Himself, was there to be reckoned with at the end. Noe would live his life, do good where he could find it to do. Be faithful to his work, his art. Love his wife and family, even when he heard Inez, Cordelia and Elee scrapping.

What else could Hesta’s God, her Maker, her El Senor himself, want?

Then why these dreams of animals? What was shaping his visions? What journey was ahead? He penciled the shapes from his dreams on a roll of brown paper. He unrolled more of the paper as he drew. He had dreamed more than he realized. What were these shapes? Camels, strange and exotic, he had never seen except in the Brownsville Gladys Porter Zoo.

He felt something was pulling out his eye.

His sons came of an evening with their plates of flautas and refried beans. Roberto and Inez. Domingo and Cornelia. Dagoberto and Elee, who was never ready, always late. Once, Dagoberto arrived without her. She came ambling in later, quiet and subdued, feeling shame. But she had to make certain of everything. Nothing stayed in the same place for her. Her shoes. Her little anklets edged with tatting. Whatever she needed, she had to look for. Find. Her world was watery as the Gulf and ever moving. Her dark sullen eyes moped about the room. What disarray the lives of Dagoberto and Elee would be when the children came. How loose. Unwired.

Noe continued work on his figures, painting them the yellow of a papier-mâché dog he had seen in Mexico—trying to find the essence at the core of yellow. The yellow that turned the eye into it and would not let it go. If he could look straight at the sun—he would know it. He would have it. An electrified yellow. The electrification of yellow. Even the sun could not fade it for years. The sun was what they had in Brownsville. Licking everything dry. Dulling it. The brown hills, the brown land. He lived at the bottom of the page dropping off into Mexico.

Long ago, he visited his grandparents in a barrio south of Matamoros in the Republic of Mexico in their adobe house. Inside his grandparent’s house, where the adobe walls were a foot thick, it was cool. The house was built for the heat. Why didn’t Noe have an adobe shed for his work place? Why was it a shed made of wood with a tin roof that sat out in the middle of the sun? The heat waves sometimes rose in his eyes. The whole earth wavered with Elee’s indecision. What had been there in the relationship with his grandparents?—Those brilliant days. The irretrievable—the unretrievable past was the ache at the core of yellow.

Noe’s grandfather’s name had been Lamech. His great-grandfather had lived long enough that he remembered him. Whittling on wood with his bent and swollen fingers, his aching hands. His language the waltz of the gulf waves. Those days crushed in the past—those words bled yellow in Noe’s memory.

The heat of Brownville. Despite the large ceiling fans in his shed. The canvas awning. Despite the spray of water he hosed over the tin roof in the early evening so he could work after supper when his family had gone to the ongoing