Thoughts on _The Harless Grocery_

I've been fielding some private questions about yesterday's short story, The Harless Grocery. 'Thought I'd cut and paste a few of those answers here for anyone else who might be interested.




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First off, you've got Jimmy. He's got a sense that there's something wrong with the way the world's going. He feels the loss of closeness and community in the rise of the nameless corporate, and he's willing to do something about it. In fact, he's willing to engage on a personal level, to risk what he's got to help society's need.

However, there's a little statement at the beginning of the story that is revelatory. "There were limits to what any man could do on his own."

Jimmy's got a system going that most of us (including me) would admire. He's engaging in a culture where folks are accustomed to living off others, and he's teaching the values of responsibility and work. So when the story starts, he seems to be a heroic figure. He is willing to sacrifice on multiple levels to engage in a mentor role where he is teaching the dignity of labor.

So a thief enters and steals a loaf of bread. Why bread? Bread is a literature-rich image. (Think Les Mis.) It’s also deeply connected to the idea of Christ. I won’t go into all that here; however, as this woman reaches out and steals bread, and she gets caught. Jimmy expects her to pay.

Now this is a different dynamic than what we’ve heard about in the story already. Previously, we’ve heard about situations where people asked for help. This time, the woman committed an offense against Jimmy. She tried to take from him.

Jimmy has obviously handled this kind of thing before, and he thinks he knows the appropriate payment. He doesn’t even question it. In his mind, bread (plus other good stuff) equals an hour of work. Yet the woman forces a different question to the surface. For Jimmy’s system to work, the payment will have to go beyond the cost of food to the cost of stealing itself.

The woman is an unlikely prophet. She wipes the sweat off her own face and wipes it on Jimmy like a strange kind of baptism. In his recoil, we see how little he understood about true need. He didn’t get a foundational Biblical concept, that poverty is universal. The truth is not that “they” are poor and “we” help them. The truth is that we are all poor. All of humanity stands in need, even those who are pursuing idealism. and good behavior, and sacrifice.

What Jimmy offers seems like common sense, even grace to us: that an hour of honest work would pay for an offense.

Yet the thief challenges Jimmy. Eve stole one piece of fruit. Would an hour of cleaning the bathrooms more than cover that loss? We know the answer to that. It took the blood of the God of the Universe to pay it off.

It’s interesting that the woman thinks Jimmy is asking her to prostitute herself when he first makes the offer. Jimmy is horrified, because he has established such a fair system of payment. (I’m not going to parse that out here, but it’s not accidental.)

In the end, the thief offers to trade Jimmy something she has for the bread. She’s convinced what she’s got will pay for the bread, and in fact, that Jimmy will leave the deal with a profit. (This bit is important, BTW: “Ain’t no such thing as a fair trade when it comes to stealin’,” said the woman. “One of us has got to leave with more than the other. That’s how stealing works.”)

What she trades him is strange. It wasn’t even hers to begin with. It’s something that she obtained for free and that has no obvious exchange value. (You can’t put a price sticker on this can. All she’s got is somebody else’s dream.)

Besides that, there’s not even a plot to the dream. It’s not a story. It’s just one image. A city from which light emerges.

What has caught the thief’s interest is the difference between a city on which light falls from above and a city that emits its own light. These women (the thief and her sister) are obviously taken with the idea of that, but they don’t seem to understand why. They just know that looking at such a thing was like seeing music. (It transcends dimensionality.)

There is an image somewhat similar to this in the book of Revelation. There is a city from which light emerges constantly, because it is indwelt by the living Christ.

And so the question rises subtly, is the grocer (and the microcosm of rescue he has created) a city from which light is emerging, or a city on which light falls?

He has identified the idolatry (did you notice that word early in the story?) of the 30-foot ceilings and artificial universe of the Wal-Mart, but he doesn’t realize that the light falling through the windows of a little small-town grocery that every one of us would adore also moves through the stuff of earth.

As that question lingers, a little boy enters. Twelve years old. (Same age as Jesus entering the temple.) He asks who paid for the bread, and that is the most important question of the story.

Jimmy releases her. An exchange has been made on a different sort of economy altogether.

The Harless Grocery (Full Story)

Harless Grocery was the last of the private groceries serving the greater Salver County area. Within six months of the Super Wal-Mart’s descent upon Sloane Street, both the Blue Ridge Short Stop and Mack’s Pharmacy and Health Food had closed their doors.

As of mid July, Harless was still operational, but it was struggling.  Jimmy Harless had pulled some of his own money out of retirement to make it through February, and if sales didn’t rise this month, he’d have to do the same. He was willing to sacrifice because he knew his role in the community; still there were limits to what any man could do on his own.

Come seven o’clock, Jimmy would lock the front door and watch the sun singing through the dust light of the front window glass. He’d sweep the floors, line up the cans of shoepeg corn, and check for missing price stickers. Every can got its own sticker at Harless Grocery. That made some kind of statement Jimmy could neither say outright nor let go.

Watching evening fall through the shelves, Jimmy would worry himself over the indulgence (and consequential exhaustion) that twenty-four-hour accessibility forced upon a society. He had seen the idolatry of the artificial heavens, thirty-foot expansion ceilings, fluorescent suns blaring, and China-made panty hose sold by the dozens. “Little wonder the world's in the state it is,” he would say to himself. 

Two sorts of people shopped in Harless Grocery. There were the idealists, of course; sentimental youth and stubborn old men who appreciated the fact that that Jimmy Harless not only bought local potatoes but also knew why Shauna Dillon was in the hospital last week. Jimmy was a man of the community, and the human touch still mattered, they said.

The second sort of Harless Grocery customers were creatures of convenience. Harless was walking distance from the Blue Lake Public Housing complex as well as Sung Hills retirement community, so residents could walk down on nice days to buy a loaf or bread or a gallon of milk when they didn’t want to take the trouble of catching a city bus to Sloane Street.

Of course Jimmy didn’t trust the Blue Lake crowd, but he was glad for them stopping in. When they tried to run up credit, saying there was no food at all in their pantries, Jimmy would think up some hour-long job that needed to be done; and while Ruby Wells was taking out the trash or busting the ice off the meat freezer, Jimmy was loading up a paper sack full of canned green beans, a frozen chicken, and a sack of dinner rolls for her to take home. It was satisfying to train the disadvantaged in the proper exchange of things. You just can’t get that kind of service on Sloane.

It was nearly six forty-five when the front door of the Harless Grocery swung open. A woman Jimmy had never seen before walked inside. She was close to fifty with broken blonde hair and a face tanned twenty years past any sort of softness. She had enormous fallen breasts that swung below a faded, giant Metallica shirt, and she walked heaving legs that seemed unfamiliar with movement of any kind. The smell of cigarette and summer sweat flew through the store, and she didn’t bother to cover her mouth when she hacked loose something caught in her throat.  

She made her way to the back of the grocery, and in the convex mirror that hung from the ceiling, Jimmy watched her stuff a loaf white bread under her shirt and pinch it beneath her armpit. Then she walked around the back side of the aisles, not making eye contact, and made a bee line for the exit. It happened so fast, Jimmy barely had the time to step out from behind the counter and hold the door shut.

“You can take that bread home, but you’re going to need to work for it,” he said.

“I ain’t that kind, Mister” said the woman. “’I don’t let nobody touch me.” 

The accusation rattled him. In all his years of confronting shoplifters, nobody had ever taken his offer to work to mean something so terrible as that. He imagined the woman pushing past him and running out into the street, pointing back at the grocery and shouting “You hear what that man asked me to do?” The thought of it made him sick. He wasn’t the sort to use people, and everybody who knew him knew that much. 

Jimmy thought hard about his next words before he said them, and they came out stilted, “That’s not what I was meaning, Ma’am. 'Not what I meant at all. I was meaning honest work. If you need bread, you can have it, but I could use some help cleaning my bathrooms as a trade.”

The woman hacked her throat, and the bread slid out from under her shirt and hit the floor. The top third of the loaf was smashed nearly flat. She let it lie there.

“I ain’t going to clean your bathrooms,” she said.

“Listen, I’m asking for an hour of honest work, and I’ll give you more than bread. I’ll send you home with dinner enough for two nights. A bag full of stuff. It’s a good trade, and it pays me back for what you took.”

“Mister, what do you know about being poor?”

Jimmy didn’t know what to say. The woman walked up right next to where he was standing, close enough that Jimmy could see the cigarette stains on her fingernails. A line of perspiration was rolling down the side of her temple, and she wiped it off with the palm of her hand. When she was done, she took the wet and wiped it on the sleeve of Jimmy’s button-down shirt. He flinched without meaning to, and the woman laughed until she coughed.

“There,” she said. “I took a handful of your bread, and I traded you for a handful of my poverty. Why'ja jump? You scared poor might rub off on ya? Scared you might catch it?”

Jimmy felt something start to burn inside him. She had no right. “Listen, Lady. You realize I could call the police, right? You can’t just walk in some place and take something that’s not yours. You’ve got to pay for it.”

“Anybody who thinks an hour of work will pay off stealing don’t even know what stealing is to begin with,” said the woman. “That Eve stolt an apple ofta tree, didn’t she? What’s one of them apples cost? You think an hour cleaning bathrooms gonna make that right?” When she grinned, the yellow grit of her damaged teeth caught the last of the sun’s light. Jimmy noticed that her eyes were clear and grey, like a broken piece of glass that’s been rolled around in the waves until the edges are soft. She hacked, then began talking again, “I do got something that pays off stealing. But you’ll owe me when I’m done and not the other way round.”

“I don’t want to owe you, Lady” Jimmy said, “All I want is a fair trade.”

“Ain’t no such thing as a fair trade when it comes to stealin’,” said the woman. “One of us has got to leave with more than the other. That’s how stealing works.”

Jimmy stood with his arms folded across his chest, watching the floor and listening to breath grind in and out of the woman's lungs. He could smell beer and something else he couldn’t name. It was nearly sweet, like a peach rotting. He tried not to think about it. The woman started talking again.

“Alright, here goes,” she said. “My cousin up to Blue Lake had this dream the other night. She was walking toward a city that was sitting a valley between two hills. At least she thought there was two hills. She couldn’t see them, she just thought they must be hills, because everything outside a that city was darkness. 

“Now the light in that city didn’t come from above it, like a sun was shining down on it. And it didn’t come from the windows, like the were electric lights burning after dark. There was something about the city itself they's let off light. It was like the walls, and the rooftops, and the earth below had light inside it. She said they's no way to know the difference between light coming down onto a place and light coming out of it until you seen it yourself. Said it was like she was looking at music.”

The grocery door swung open all of a sudden, and Jimmy had to step out of the way to keep it from hitting him hard in the foot. Boy about twelve stepped inside. 

“Momma, where you been?” he asked.

“Had to pick up a loaf of bread for dinner,” answered the woman.

“Where’d you get the money for it?” he asked.

“Made a trade,” she said, grinning yellow at Jimmy like they were tight friends. “He got off bettern’ I did, but you got to be gen’rous now and then.”

The woman picked her bread up off the floor, and she and the boy walked out the door together. Jimmy stepped out behind them. He watched them walk down Main a good long ways. In fact, he watched them until they took a right onto Okala. 

Notes from Mind of the Maker by Dorothy Sayers (1-4)

Argh. This is an old draft, but it published as if it were from today. Sorry.


I'm spending today taking chapter-by-chapter notes of this book. I decided to post them here in case they are helpful to anyone else. Since I'm looking for thesis material, these will be somewhat slanted toward that end. But if you need a general guide to what info is in each chapter, hopefully the page numbers listed will help you find what you need more quickly.

I'm using the Harper One edition. It says 1987, but the book doesn't look that old. I'll update this post after I get each chapter finished, changing the title a little until I'm done.

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Chapter 1. THE “LAWS” OF NATURE AND OPINION

There are at least two main sorts of laws:
a. “an arbitrary code of behavior based on a consensus of human opinion”
b. “a statement of unalterable fact about the nature of the universe”

“There is a universal moral law, as distinct from a moral code, which consists of certain statements of fact about the nature of man; and by behaving in conformity with which, man enjoys his true freedom. This is what the Christian church calls ‘the natural law.’ The more closely the moral code agrees with the natural law, the more it makes for freedom in human behavior; the more widely it departs from the natural law, the more it tends to enslave mankind and to produce the catastrophes called ‘judgments of God.’” (9)

“The universal moral law (or natural law of humanity) is discoverable, like any other law of nature, by experience. It cannot be promulgated, it can only be ascertained, because it is not a question of opinion but of fact.” (9-10)

Moral code v. moral law (10) (Moral code derives from the moral law, and it is dependent upon human consensus about what man’s nature is and ought to be.)

“Aristotle never offered his “unities” as an a priori personal opinion about the abstract ideal of a play: he offered them as observations of fact about the kind of plays which were, in practice, successful.” (15)

This relates to the creeds. People have argued that they are simply arbitrary opinions. However, this is not their claim. “They purport to be necessary conditions based on the facts of human nature.” (15)

Analogy. There could be a regulation that only allowed the making of omelettes while wearing a top hat. There could also be a law that omelettes can only be made through the breaking of eggs. “The Christian creeds are too frequently assumed to be in the top-hat category of egg-breaking.” … “The proper question to be asked about any creed is not, ‘Is it pleasant?’ but ‘is it true?’”

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Chapter 2: THE IMAGE OF GOD

Sayers discusses what it means to be made in God’s image. She states that “only the most-simpleminded” would assume this wording means we are made to resemble God physically, and that artwork portraying Him as an elderly gentleman in robes is necessarily symbolic. (21)

The “image” in which we are created includes masculinity and femininity, and has little connection with, “the aggressive masculinity of the pictorial Jehovah” because it “represents power, rationality” etc. She says, “Christian doctrine and tradition, indeed, by language and picture, sets its face against all sexual symbolism for the divine fertility. Its Trinity is wholly masculine, as all language relating to Man as a species is masculine.”

She talks about how the Jews were aware of the dangers and limitations of capturing God with art, so they forbade it. However, “human nature and the nature of human language defeated them.” She argues that we are naturally inclined to visualize God, so it is impossible to not imagine His appearance. “To forbid the making of pictures about God would be to forbid thinking about God at all, for man is so made that he has no way to think except in pictures.” (21-22)

She ponders what the author of Genesis meant when he wrote that mankind was made in God’s image. Was there something particular intended? When we go back into the text of Genesis to see what has been said of God at this point, “we find only the single assertion, ‘God created.’” So apparently, “The characteristic common to God and man is apparently that: the desire and the ability to make things.” (22)

ON THE LIMITATIONS OF METAPHOR:

This is a metaphor, she states, quoting Aquinas:

**Those things which are said of God and other things are predicated neither univocally nor equivocally, but analogically… .

**Accordingly, since we arrive at the knowledge of God from other things, the reality of the names predicated of God and other things is first in God according to His mode, but the meaning of the name is in Him afterwards. Wherefore He is said to be named from His effects. – ST. THOMAS AQUINAS: Summa contra Gentiles. (19)

However, there is a value in the analogy: “We need not be surprised at this, still less suppose that because it is analogical it is therefore valueless or without any relation to the truth. The fact is, that all language about everything is analogical; we think in a series of metaphors. We can explain nothing in terms of itself, but only in terms of other things.” (23)

What dangers are there in interpreting God through analogy?

“It may be perilous, as it must be inadequate, to interpret God by analogy with ourselves, but we are compelled to do so; we have no other means of interpreting anything.” … “If the tendency to anthropomorphism is a good reason for refusing to think about God, it is an equally good reason for refusing to think about light, or oysters, or battleships.” (23)

She goes on to state that no matter what we encounter, we are looking through the lens of our humanity. Physicists use analogy in understanding the atom as both “wave” and “particle,” though they cannot be wholly true. Still, there is a value in the analogy. “… so long as he remembers that language and observation are human functions, partaking at every point of the limitations of humanity, he can get along quite well with them and carry out fruitful researches. To complain that man measures God by his own experience is a waste of time; man measures everything by his own experience; he has no other yardstick.” (24)

When we use various metaphors (King, Father, etc.) to describe God: “…we know perfectly well that they are metaphors and analogies; what more we know perfectly well where the metaphor begins and ends.” (25)

HOW THIS APPLIES TO ‘CREATE’:

“We use the word ‘create’ to convey an extension and amplification of something that we do know, and we limit the application of the metaphor precisely as we limit the application of the metaphor of fatherhood.” (27)

Each person is a maker. (28) “Though we cannot create matter, we continually, by rearrangement, create new and unique entities.”

“It is the artist who, more than other men, is able to create something out of nothing. A whole artistic work is immeasurably more than the sum of its parts.” (28)

Sayers posits that art also exists in a realm apart from its physical form. Then she talks about how art transcends a key law of the physical universe:

“Without the thought, though the material parts already exist, the form does not and cannot. The ‘creation’ is not a product of the matter. The amount of matter in the universe is limited, and its possible rearrangements, though the sum of them would amount to astronomical figures, is also limited. But no such limitation of numbers applies to the creation of works of art. The poet is not obliged, as it were, to destroy the material of a Hamlet in order to create a Falstaff, as a carpenter must destroy a tree-form to create a table-form. The components of the material world are fixed; those of the world of imagination increase by a continuous and irreversible process, without any destruction or rearrangement of what went before.” (29)

She writes about the resonance of the poetic world with the theological, and how that is often missed:

“Poets have, indeed, often communicated in their own mode of expression truths identical with the theologians’ truths; but just because of the difference in the modes of expression, we often fail to see the identity of the statements.” (30)

She writes about how the negative (myopic) aspects of our culture’s analytic bias:

“Our minds are not infinite; and as the volume of the world’s knowledge increases, we tend more and more to confine ourselves, each to his special sphere of interest and to the specialized metaphor belonging to it. The analytic bias of the last three centuries has immensely encouraged this tendency, and it is now very difficult for the artist to speak the language of the theologian or the scientist the language of either. But the attempt must be made; and there are signs everywhere that the human mind is once more beginning to move towards a synthesis of experience.” (30-31)

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Chapter 3. IDEA, ENERGY, POWER

Sayers addresses the common assumption that the Trinity is inconceivable because of its mysterious nature. She believes there is some truth to this; however many difficult theological concepts have at least some corollary with human experience. (35)

She mentions Augustine of Hippo’s argument that a Trinitarian structure exists in the, “trinity of sight, for example: the form seen, the act of vision, and the mental attention which correlates the two. These three, though separable in theory, are inseparably present whenever you use your sight. Again, every thought is an inseparable trinity of memory, understanding, and will.” (36)

She believes the Trinitarian structure of activity is perhaps mysterious because it permeates everything. (Like the four dimensions. We cannot imagine the space-time world outside of them.) She does believe the artist might be able to remove himself just enough from the creative process to at least to examine its structure. (36)

She quotes her play The Zeal of Thy House to begin an exploration of Idea, Energy, and Power:

**For every work [or act] of creation is threefold, an earthly trinity to match the heavenly.

**First, [not in time, but merely in order of enumeration] there is the Creative Idea, passionless, timeless, beholding the whole work complete at once, the end in the beginning: and this is the image of the Father.

**Second, there is the Creative Energy [or Activity] begotten of that idea, working in time from the beginning to the end, with sweat and passion, being incarnate in the bonds of matter: and this is the image of the Word.

**Third, there is the Creative Power, the meaning of the work and its response in the lively soul: and this is the image of the indwelling Spirit.

**And these three are one, each equally in itself the whole work, whereof none can exist without other: and this is the image of the Trinity. (39)

SOME CLARIFICATIONS ON “IDEA”:

1. The idea isn’t conscious:

The “formulation of the Idea in the writer’s mind is not the Idea itself, but its self-awareness in the Energy. Everything that is conscious, everything that has to do with form and time, and everything that has to do with process, belongs to the work of the Energy or Activity or “Word.” (38)

2. The idea doesn’t precede Energy in time:

“Energy creates the time-process” (38) (Similar to John’s concept that the Word was with God in the beginning.)

3. We know the that Energy is separate from the Idea because the Energy is constantly referring back to the Idea:

Theologically: the Son does the will of the Father

Artistically: The writer knows when a word is wrong because it doesn’t fit the Idea. The painter knows when a stroke is wrong because it doesn’t fit the Idea. (39)

4. Even though it takes time and space for the writer to work out a book, he knows it as a whole: “‘the end in the beginning.’” [I]t cannot be known as a thing-in-itself except as the Energy reveals it.”

SOME CLARIFICATIONS ON “ENERGY”

1. It is the Energy that is the creator in the sense in which the common man understands the word, because it brings about an expression in temporal form of the eternal and immutable Idea.”

2. The Idea cannot be understood without the Energy.

SOME CLARIFICATIONS ON “POWER”

1. It flows from the Idea and the Energy together. (40)

2. “It is the thing which flows back to the writer from his own activity and makes him, as it were, the reader of his own book.” (40-41)

3. “It is also, of course, the means by which the Activity is communicated to other readers and which produced a corresponding response in them. In fact from the reader’s point of view, it is the book.” (41)

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>>The unity of the creative Trinity:

Asking a writer to separate Idea, Energy, and Power leaves him confused. They are one in his mind. “Each of them is the complete book separately; yet in the complete book all of them exist together. He can, by an act of the intellect, ‘distinguish the persons’ but he cannot by any means ‘divide the substance.’ How could he? He cannot know the Idea, except by the Power interpreting his own Activity to him; he knows the Activity only as it reveals the Idea in Power; he knows the Power only as the revelation of the Idea in the Activity. All he can say is that these three are equally and eternally present in his own act of creation, and at every moment of it, whether or not the act ever becomes manifest in the form of a written and printed book.” (41)

>>The existence of the creative Trinity even when it remains within the sphere of imagination, because it works in response to itself:

“The creative act, that is, does not depend for its fulfillment upon its manifestation in a material creation.” (42)

>>The poet’s interaction with audience and with himself:

“To write the poem (or, of course, to give it material form in speech or song), is an act of love towards the poet’s own imaginative act and towards his fellow-beings. It is a social act; but the poet is, first and foremost, his own society, and would be none the less a poet if the means of material expression were refused by him or denied him.” (42)

Scientists often face difficulty because they fail to realize the analogical nature of language:

Men of science spend much time and effort in the attempt to disentangle words from their metaphorical and traditional associations; the attempt is bound to prove vain since it runs counter to the law of humanity.” (43)

Art is not like an invention, in which a later model replaces an earlier one. The appearance of Hamlet does not supersede Agamemnon. “Genius is, in fact, not subject to the ‘law’ of progress, and it is beginning to be extremely doubtful whether progress is a ‘law’ at all.” (44-45)

This means good old metaphors are still virile. “Metaphors become dead only when the metaphor is substituted for the experience, and the argument carried on in a sphere of abstraction without being at every point related to life.” (44)

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Chapter 4. THE ENERGY REVEALED IN CREATION

“…[i]t is possible for a reader, by reading a book, to discover something about the mind of the writer.” (49)

The creator is neither “the sum of all his works” nor “entirely detached from the work he has made and so unknowable in himself with the work provides us with no clue to his personality.” (49)

“We are continually tempted to confine the mind of the writer to its expression within his creation, particularly if it suits our purpose to do so. We try to identify him with this or that part of his works, as though it contained his whole mind.” (50)

However, it is correct that a “writer cannot create a character or express a thought or emotion which is not within his own mind.” (51)

Sayers discusses how this plays out within the creative process. Example of jealousy taken to the extreme. What would that be like? (51)

Chesterton quote explaining how he wrote Father Brown stories:

** “’I mean that I really did see myself, and my real self, committing the murders… I mean that I thought and thought about how a man might come to be like that, until I realised tat I really was like that, in everything except actual final consent to the action.’” (52)

However, a good writer must not become a character too much: “For if a character becomes merely a mouthpiece of the author, he ceases to be a character, and is no longer a living creation.” (53)

Good art demands diversity: “The vital power of an imaginative work demands a diversity within its unity; and the stronger the diversity, the more massive the unity. Incidentally, this is the weakness of most ‘edifying’ or ‘propaganda’ literature. There is no diversity. The Energy is active only in one part of the whole, and in consequence the wholeness is destroyed and the Power diminished.” (53) She talks about giving the devil his “due” as well as God. Then states … “a creative work in which all the characters automatically reproduce a single aspect of the writer’s mind is a work lacking in creative power.”

“The writer, then, if – under the conditions we know- he is to perform an act of power in creation, must allow his Energy to enter with an equal fullness into all his creatures, whatever portions of his personality they emphasize and embody.” (53)

A failure in this area is obvious in theater, because it is visibly awkward for a singularly-developed character to flail around a bunch of underdeveloped boobs. (54) The good playwright shifts energy from character to character while writing. (54)

“The mind is not the sum of all its works, though it includes them all. Though it produced the works one after the other, we cannot say that it is each of these works in turn. Before it made them, it included them all, potentially, and having finished them, it still includes them. It is both immanent in them and transcendent.” (56)

However, in a sense, the artwork exists independently of its author. We can interact with the art without interacting with the maker. We can “know the Iliad without knowing Homer.” (56)

Asking an author, “’What did you mean by this book?’ is to invite bafflement: the book itself is what the writer means.” (57)

We can look at a human artist’s works as “complete” at the end of his life. However, God’s works are different. He is Creator past, present, and future. She defies the idea that God just finished creating and stepped back to let things roll on their own, because it doesn’t correlate with human experience in creativity. Creativity builds upon what exists instead of destroys and remakes. (59)

“We are thus considering the temporal universe as one of those great serial works of which installments appear from time to time, all related to a central idea whose completeness is not yet manifest to the reader.” … “By our response to it, we are brought within the mind of the author and are caught up into the stream of his Power, which proceeds form his Energy, revealing his Idea to us and to himself.” (59)

Shirley, Goodness, and Mercy. (Whole Story)

“Well, she didn’t need no more kids to begin with, that’s for damn sure.” Shirley hit the oscillator knob on the fan so that the breeze could meet her full force. August always made her sweat like a pig. She peeled a corner of her wet cotton shirt off her chest and pumped it up and down to get some air. Then she slid her weight forward off the green metal rocker chair and reached round to unstick the fabric from her back flesh.

Marylyn, Shirley’s sister, had stepped over from next door to visit. She was leaning against the porch rail, flipping through the September Good Housekeeping, studying which jeans flatter a particular body type. Every once in a while, she would look up at her own reflection in the storm door window and try to decide if she was apple or pear-shaped. “Bless her heart,” Marylyn said, “She was a good woman, tryin’ to do things right.”

“Ain’t no good woman to it. Just because you’re taking them in don’t mean you’re taking care of them.” Shirley sopped at her neck rolls with a wilted Kleenex. Then she yelled into the side yard, “Hazel! You quit that, or I’m gonna walk out there misself and whoop your ass!”

Hazel was seven. She was twisting around and around in the tire swing, hanging onto the ropes and leaning back, trying to kick her little brother Jack in the face with her flip flops. “Momma, it's not my fault!” She whined. “He keeps getting too close to me! I keep tellin' him to scoot back!"

Jack picked up a stick and smacked his sister's foot as it reached for him. Hazel yelped and booted Jack hard enough to knock him down in the dirt.

“They say she hasn’t been downtown in three weeks. Not even to church,” said Marylyn.

“Course she hasn’t,” said Shirley, “Don’t want to be seen if she can’t be seen as a hero.”

“Now, Shirley, you can’t think she meant any harm to that baby. And that little girl who did it, she ain’t old enough to realize. These things just happen.”

“These things happen when you got too many kids in the house because some crazy ass woman in Henderson, Kentucky decides she wants to play Mother Teresa. Remember that article in the Times about her a year or two ago? ‘Let the little children come unto me,” she said. Talking like she's Jesus hisself. I knew then something wasn’t right about her.”

A grey minivan pulled up to the house on the other side of Shirley's from Marylyn's. A girl about eight jumped out of the back passenger side with a tall, soft book rolled up in her hands. She ran up to the front door and pushed the bell. The door swung open, and she ran inside.

Mr. Virgil was considered the best piano teacher in town. He had to be to charge what he did. Twenty dollars a half-hour, they say.

“You wouldn’t see me letting Hazel in that house for all the Mozart in the world,” Shirley said. “That man turned forty this year and he's still not married. 'Lives with his momma. Somethin's not right about that. He was talking to Jack across the fence yesterday, and I made him get inside.”

“A’course you did,” said Marylyn. “’Cain’t be too careful with people like that.”

The side window of Mr. Virgil’s house sighed open, and he raised a big box fan into the space of it. Through the blades, child notes began to leak out, chopped and unsteady.

Hazel and Jack grew bored with smacking one another and decided to join forces in mockery. “Twinkle Twinkle little star, Virgil’s mommy drives his car.” They sang it singsong loud and laughing. Obviously this wasn't the first time. Shirley bellowed at them to stop, but they sang it again and again until she hauled herself up out of the rocker, scooted down the steps and across the dust of the yard, grabbed them both by the backs of their shirt necks, and shook them until they wailed. Hazel kicked at Shirley until she cursed and dropped them both. They ran inside, punching one another, calling dibs on the last of the orange popsicles.

Shirley sank back down in her rocker. "Take that other seat over there, Marylyn. No use you just standing when we got two good chairs for sitting."

Marylyn complied, and Shirley set the fan back on oscillate. "You wouldn't know this, because you and Frank never had kids, but I do know it because of Hazel and Jack. Just you imagine for a moment, a real live human being growing up from nothing inside your own stomach and coming out a part of you. 'Means you know them back and forth, that's what. Everything about them. That's a real bond, right there."

Marylyn waved at a fly and swallowed the old wound hard.

“People should raise their own kids,” Shirley muttered, then she nodded across the street. Joe Taylor was working on his yard.

Joe was built strong and fine. His wife practiced yoga and wore her t-shirts too tight. She had a PhD from somewhere up North. Word was that she was never happy with him. They had a little girl adopted from overseas, China or Korea, maybe the Philippines, nobody knew for sure or cared much. They did know this much: that woman bought a daughter so she wouldn’t have to touch her man in bed.

"Curse of the fathers," continued Shirley, "When you go get one of them things and bring it home, curse of the fathers gets ya. Goes down ta' the third generation I hear. Bringing that into your home, hell knows what you gonna end up with."

Hazel and Jack let the side door slam behind them. A stray dog was in the street, and the kids ran out calling with soft voices, trying to lure it with popsicle sticks. When it got close enough to start sniffing, they picked up rocks and started yelling, "You git outta here, you ugly old mutt!" Jack chased after it barking like Caliban. The pitiful beast tucked tail and doubled speed. Shirley laughed then leaned her head back against the rocker and shut her eyes. "Damn strays," she said.

Marylyn had shut hers already, so they didn't hear Joe Taylor's wife approaching until her shoes hit the porch. She was selling raffle tickets to benefit the family. She asked  if they knew about it, the tragedy with that baby? Of course they'd heard about it. Everybody had. Joe's wife offered that it was such a sad situation, and Shirley said at least it wasn't that woman's real baby that had died.

"What's the prize?" asked Shirley. "Flat screen television. Forty inches," said Joe's wife. "What's it gonna cost me?" asked Shirley.

"$1 for one or $3 for five. 'Drawing is Friday at the Legion. Seven o'clock. You have to be there to win."

Shirley had wanted a flat screen for a good three years. "Give me ten. I got six dollars here." She leaned back and dug a wrinkly handful of ones out of her shorts pocket.

- - - -

There were two hundred folding chairs set up in the Legion gym, and about half of them were full by 6:45. The concession stand was up and running, and twenty something kids were running around the back of the room picking popcorn out of striped paper bags, sucking on their blow pops, and kicking kick balls at one another until they spilled their Pepsis on the wood floor. Old men had their arms thrown over the chairs next to them, talking about the state of the world and growing tomatoes. The sound system was hooked up, and three teenagers were hovering over it. Rihanna's "Where Have You Been?" was playing too loud, and the bass was cranked up so as you could feel it in the bottoms of your shoes.

Shirley bought three popcorns and three Pepsi's and made her way to the second to the last row on the back side. Hazel and Jack grabbed theirs and disappeared into the child throng.

Marylyn had packed food in her purse so she wouldn't have to pay. She settled down next to Shirley and tore open a bag of Chili Cheese Fritos.

Martie Clem was sitting two rows ahead, and when she saw Shirley and Marylyn, she grabbed her pocketbook and stepped back a row to talk. "You girls better not beat me to that flat screen," she teased.

"I ain't going to win it," Shirley said. "I don't never win nothing. I don't even know why I'm here." 

"Well, they're giving away more than the T.V. The Shell station donated a $50 gas card, and the Wal-Mart did something too. Can't remember what exactly." Martie hollered across the room for her son to run and get her one of those programs. A white-haired boy about ten showed up with what looked like a leftover church bulletin printed with a list of prizes inside. Martie opened it up and scanned the page, holding it so Shirley and Marylyn could see.

"$40 gift card to Fernando's," said Marylin, "I'd use that. Get me a new dress."

"Ten pounds of New York strip from High Ham's," said Martie.

"Twenty piano lessons from Mr. Virgil. That's what I'll win, you watch." said Shirley, "'Got no need for that man, and that's exactly the one I'll get."

Joe Taylor's wife was up on stage adjusting the microphone. The murmur in the room settled. Rihanna faded out.

"I'd like to thank you all, on the behalf of the Tremble family, for coming tonight," she said. "The best in a community rises during a time of loss. Some of you have taken meals, others have donated, all of you are here tonight because you are willing to help carry a grief that is too great for any one person to bear. On behalf of the Trembles, I thank you."

Then Joe Taylor's wife stepped back from the microphone and gave a nod to the front row. Mr. Virgil rose from his chair held out his elbow to the little girl sitting beside him. She was near eleven, slight, and looked terrified. Even from where Shirley sat, you could see she was pale as a paper. Her dress was loose, and it hung thrown over her, as if material covering could give form to light. Mr. Virgil walked her up the stairs and stood her behind the microphone which Joe Taylor's wife was adjusting lower. Mr. Virgil slipped behind the piano on stage.

A murmur went through the crowd like thunder. "That's the girl who done it," whispered Shirley to Marylyn. "That's her right there. She done it."

Joe Taylor's wife bent over to speak into the microphone. "And now, I'd like to welcome Hope Tremble to the stage. Hope is a fifth grader at Henderson Elementary." She gave Hope a side hug strong enough to pick her feet off the floor, then put her hand on the little girl's cheek before she stepped back two feet to take her seat on stage.

Mr. Virgil pressed the notes of the intro so gently, like two hands holding a wounded bird. Yet at the place where everyone could tell Hope was supposed to start singing, she didn't. She just stared into the crowd, looking from face to face to face. Mr. Virgil smoothed it over. He went back to the start and played everything again. Hope took a deep breath and opened her mouth.

"What wondrous love is this, O my soul, O my soul..." It was hardly more than a whisper.

 Shirley drained the last of her Pepsi and folded her arms over her chest. She leaned back in her folding chair and heaved all the breath out of her lungs, wondering how she could sell those piano lessons if she won them.

Notes from the Seaside

I walked a half-mile of wet sand this evening.

Stepping two bare feet in salted, sighing recessions,

I crossed a chorus,

grace, upon grace,

upon grace.

The seaside runs white-laced and popping, 

sizzles, tickles my ankles, sucks at my toes, 

impresses the full-roaring strength of mighty miles of ocean 

soft as a husband upon land-sore bones.

Waves tease the earth out from below my weight

until I laugh,

unsteadied, 

arms cast out like a child catching her balance.

I am vain enough to measure my own feet 

against the prints others have left.

It is because they are ugly and too big,

that they leave no mark at all upon the sand. 

I have learned to place them lightly, at least.

In the secrecy of evening,

I press my sole into forms left by the beautiful ones

like a servant trying on crowns.

I feel the cool, deep heel caves left by the confident,

and I wonder what it is like

to pass the earth with such surety.

Here is a neat, even row of toes. 

They dig each step into earth

as if they might cling to it.

And see there! Such pretty, high arches. 

A dancer, perhaps?

Someone holds those feet in his lap at night.

He touches them and is proud of them.

He marvels at their delicacy.

It takes courage to align my foot 

against the expanse left by a workshoe.

Mine is smaller by two inches.

I am less than I have thought,

I breathe.

“Love, upon love, 

such vast deep love.”

The seaside sighs,

as if it meant love for me;

and so I walk lightly,

leaving no trace,

afraid of breaking the spell.

Pelicans, seven in a line, 

fly bellies nearly touching water top,

rise like notes on a page.

Black-legged birds with yellow socks 

run silly from waves,

making a spectacle of themselves.

A lost feather rolls in the recession,

a third of a cigarette,

broken brown shells and blue ones turning,

one perfect white half shell,

serene, 

rim-down waiting.

Against the rain-pocked sand,

each wave yawns higher,

makes a mirror,

casts the blushing sky back to the heavens.