The Eighth Moon , livre ebook
112
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English
Ebooks
2024
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112
pages
English
Ebook
2024
Vous pourrez modifier la taille du texte de cet ouvrage
Obtenez un accès à la bibliothèque pour le consulter en ligne En savoir plus
Publié par
Date de parution
07 mai 2024
Nombre de lectures
0
EAN13
9781639550692
Langue
English
Poids de l'ouvrage
5 Mo
- Physical galley quantities available for major media, nonfiction media, environmental media, regional media, booksellers and librarians; digital galleys available for download on Edelweiss
- Media outreach to author’s contacts at major national outlets positioning this title as a singular book that weaves social, political and natural history together, for readers who want a nourishing reading experience in the midst of reactionary politics
- Advertising with NAIBA to target booksellers and readers on the East Coast
- Email marketing through the publisher to communities of more than 65K readers and buyers, with special push to academic market for course adoption
- Reader’s Guides available for download
- Author tour events in New York, Brooklyn, and Washington DC
- Author has been widely published in Harper’s, Best American Essays, the New York Review, Los Angeles Review of Books, McSweeney’s, BOMB and many other outlets
- Strong blurbs from Chris Kraus, Emmanual Iduma, and Adrian Shirk, with more forthcoming
- This debut’s bold and creative approach to exploring time, grief, place and the overlapping outcomes of multiple political and social movements over three centuries will provide opportunities for wide coverage
- Well connected author whose name has helped gain early interest from New York Review of Books, New York Times Magazine, New Yorker and BOMB Magazine.
Chapter 18
After a spring of snow, we have a summer of droughts. There are warnings of forest fires. Crops fail. We go to the shed/shack, and in the crumbling foundation, David finds a patent medicine bottle with moss and a fern growing in it like a terrarium, as if this could contain the world.
I want to think of David and me and my parents in this world. I am so near to where they’d lived and been happy. Early in the morning and late at night I pack boxes for the move. I try to do it myself because David has to leave again for work. While he is away, I help out at the annual carnival that the volunteer fire department sponsors. At the fair kids scream on rides and lights pierce the sky. A shooting gallery gives away fluffy plush toys. The air smells of fried dough. Neon flashes red and green. Someone passes me in a Blue Lives Matter T-shirt.
I watch the fireworks with a neighbor in the fire department, a retired earth sciences teacher. Red sparks bloom overhead. I ask about joining the fire department. Explosions dazzle against the darkness.
Why do you want to join? The teacher yells over the noise. The shriek of roman candles makes any answer impossible. I say something about sirens and guilt, knowing someone else is waking at 3:37 or 4:53 for their neighbors, for me, and now that my parents are dead I have time to. I also want to mention the floods we get, and the logger’s death. His body had to be recovered by his uncle and cousin in the department. I cannot imagine that pain.
The words drift. Bursts of blue and white gleam off the faces of the crowd around us.
What I don’t say or can’t explain is that joining is to say I am here and serve, but there’s also politics in the alarms and emergencies and political urgency. Everything feels torn between us and them whatever us we are, and the fire department is full of older white men, good-old boys who might not associate the red in redneck with miners strikes and links to Wobblies and communists. There are my parents, too, my dad with the broom and my mom with the cat. Joining is about a transcendence I want to achieve, to be all of us, all together. That too feels political in a small town where the volunteer fire department is the most basic civic institution. It is our mutual aid society.
In the now of writing, I also have time—not just free time but other times.
~~
That summer, the president says he will restore law and order, and we’re just getting started. He says your Second Amendment is safe. He makes this speech in a town with a Lenape name. Soon he calls racists fine people.
At the picnic in the woods, alcohol is passed man to man and boy to boy. Exhaustion transforms into a jangly feel in their bones of the fight to come that day. At this table I see Brisbane and Zera Preston and Bluebeard, even Devyr, though surely he is in Albany this day. He comes often though to the Catskills to meet with farmers, and I imagine his sitting down with the men in their masks.
In these days of summer, one August transposes into another. It is early in the month: a slim moon in the night sky. The men travel in wagons, driving twenty miles in the dark and at dawn. If asked, they say they’re off fishing, but they carry no poles, no fishing gear. They stop for whiskey and drink and sleep in a barn. In the morning the farmer serves them breakfast and joins them with his cart. Guns are hidden under blankets. Dresses are wrapped in parcels. A man, Gus, meets them on my hill. All have fake names like Bullet Hawk and Hawk Anteluba, Red Bird and Rainbow.
I see the smudged ink on the Leatherheads’ letter, like blood.
In both Augusts, men carry dirks, knives, guns, swords, torches. . . . The day after those fine people rally around a racist monument in Charlottesville and march with tiki torches and murder a woman, running her over with a car, I stand at the gates of my county fair. I shake fists and signs. The fair will not stop selling or displaying the Confederate flag. I lunge at the fair commissioner. Cops circle. Rudd’s brother Burr gives a speech in protest. We reap what we sow, he says. He talks about family: Revolution and Civil War, code words and dog whistles. We rally in front of the fair’s gates. Rage shudders through my body. Anger has a taste and smell: coins and sweat, something wiry and silver. I yell. Burr speaks, and in this time, these times, both times, that time is now. The us, the we. Violence shimmers like a mirage.
Burr mentions the relatives who fought, and the cops are on all sides, and in another world, this different August, they are amassed on a hillside in Andes, just west of my town. Cut to that other August: a cop is shot. Lines are drawn on the land.
~~
My picture ends up in the local paper. I’m thrusting a sign in the air. That week at the dump, the guys working there, of whom I am fond, teasingly call me Trouble. Here comes Trouble, they say.
~~
The cop is the enemy, Osman Steele. A portrait of him hangs in an old tavern that serves as the Andes historical society. It was painted maybe a year before his death, and he has an imperious expression: long nose and sleepy eyes and wears something like a cravat. Turned to the side, he looks down at the painter, or at us. The anti-renters call the officials “foxes.” He has red hair. Make your red hair redder.
In the paper I’m wearing cut-offs and anger. My sign is aloft, my mouth caught in a jeer.
Now a road sign at the entrance to Andes is emblazoned with one of Steele’s taunts: “Lead can’t penetrate Steele.” He makes the boast the morning he heads to Moses Earle’s farm, August 7, 1845. He’s in this very tavern drinking, and the owner warns him not to go.
At the dump one of the men stands with me as I hold a carton of recycling. I saw you in the paper, Trouble, he says. His voice: levity, joking, and I could laugh and shrug. I don’t know what to say. He’s a walrus of a man with a Tom Selleck mustache and wire-frame glasses. And, I have stood here before and asked if I could hang out with them for the day. I have an affinity for the dump, for the artistry of the two men who work here, both, in fact, walruses of men with Tom Selleck mustaches. The one I’m speaking with now has told me about his collection of glass insulator caps from power lines and telephone poles, and how he wants one from England, and we have talked about the installations he makes from things people throw out: the TVs stacked on high, the group of mannequins including a child in an orange safety vest, the yard figurines and statues of dogs, cats, horses, roosters, rabbits, and other assorted animals on a ledge above the men’s office. Nearby a plastic buck once used for target practice is surrounded by plastic flowers. He has told me about the deer he sees around the transfer station and the turkeys that browse on the hill, and I have asked if he’s been out hunting yet that year. He has said no, I don’t hunt, not anymore. And I have told him that’s a shame and he has said, Nah, I just can’t, can’t bear to; by which I understand that he just doesn’t have the heart for it, not any longer.
We have had, I guess, more than small talk but I am nervous to answer and I look into my plastic bin: the mayo jar with its blue lid and an empty bottle of cheap rosé, organic peanut butter—more than one container of organic peanut butter—and another of tahini and an olive oil bottle to which a golden slick of oil clings, and I feel put on the spot by my stuff; it marks me out. No time has passed. And, it feels like centuries. On the ground broken glass coruscates in the light. I have to say something, and the sun is on my calves, and I say I don’t know.
At my feet the glass twinkles and taunts. I glance at him and the glue where the label had been on the mayo jar. I must explain this August.
Free and fair for all, I say, as if some libertarian line. I don’t know about you, but I live here to be free, to be in the country, to lead life as I want—and I look again at mayo, the glue, and a red dribble of wine that has stained the bin—And, if I moved here to be free and that flag is definitely not freedom—if it’s only free for some or fair for few, I don’t want that. I evade mentioning my family, my Black cousins and my own connections. I flush. Someone tosses recycling into the canisters, glass shatters behind us. A pickup pulls in, and to my relief the walrus of a man with his wire-frame glasses says, Yeah, that makes sense. I get that.
Publié par
Date de parution
07 mai 2024
Nombre de lectures
0
EAN13
9781639550692
Langue
English
Poids de l'ouvrage
5 Mo
