ETHER, OR

For the Narrative Americans

Edna

I never go in the Two Blue Moons any more. I thought about that when I was arranging the grocery window today and saw Corrie go in across the street and open up. Never did go into a bar alone in my life. Sook came by for a candy bar and I said that to her, said I wonder if I ought to go have a beer there sometime, see if it tastes different on your own. Sook said Oh Ma you always been on your own. I said I seldom had a moment to myself and four husbands, and she said You know that don’t count. Sook’s fresh. Breath of fresh air. I saw Needless looking at her with that kind of dog look men get. I was surprised to find it gave me a pang, I don’t know what of. I just never saw Needless look that way. What did I expect, Sook is twenty and the man is human. He just always seemed like he did fine on his own. Independent. That’s why he’s restful. Silvia died years and years and years ago, but I never thought of it before as a long time. I wonder if I have mistaken him. All this time working for him. That would be a strange thing. That was what the pang felt like, like when you know you’ve made some kind of mistake, been stupid, sewn the seam inside out, left the burner on.

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They’re all strange, men are. I guess if I understood them I wouldn’t find them so interesting. But Toby Walker, of them all he was the strangest. The stranger. I never knew where he was coming from. Roger came out of the desert, Ady came out of the ocean, but Toby came from farther. But he was here when I came. A lovely man, dark all through, dark as forests. I lost my way in him. I loved to lose my way in him. How I wish it was then, not now! Seems like I can’t get lost any more. There’s only one way to go. I have to keep plodding along it. I feel like I was walking across Nevada, like the pione,ers, carrying a lot of stuff I need, but as I go along I have to keep dropping off things. I had a piano once but it got swamped at a crossing of the Platte. I had a good frypan but it got too heavy and I left it in the Rockies. I had a couple ovaries but they wore out around the time we were in the Carson Sink. I had a good memory but pieces of it keep dropping off, have to leave them scattered around in the sagebrush, on the sand hills. All the kids are still coming along, but I don’t have them. I had them, it’s not the same as having them. They aren’t with me any more, even Archie and Sook. They’re all walking along back where I was years ago. I wonder will they get any nearer than I have to the west side of the mountains, the valleys of the orange groves? They’re years behind me. They’re still in Iowa. They haven’t even thought about the Sierras yet. I didn’t either till I got here. Now I begin to think I’m a member of the Donner Party.

Thos. Sunn

The way you can’t count on Ether is a hindrance sometimes, like when I got up in the dark this morning to catch the minus tide and stepped out the door in my rubber boots and plaid jacket with my clam spade and bucket, and overnight she’d gone inland again. The damn desert and the damn sagebrush. All you could dig up there with your damn spade would be a God damn fossil. Personally I blame it on the Indians. I do not believe that a fully

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civilised country would allow these kind of irregularities in a town. However as I have lived here since 1949 and could not sell my house and property for chicken feed, I intend to finish up here, like it or not. That should take a few more years, ten or fifteen most likely. Although you can’t count on anything these days anywhere let alone a place like this. But I like to look after myself, and I can do it here. There is not so much Government meddling and interference and general hindering in Ether as you would find in the cities. This may be because it isn’t usually where the Government thinks it is, though it is, sometimes.

When I first came here I used to take some interest in a woman, but it is my belief that in the long run a man does better not to. A woman is a worse hindrance to a man than anything else, even the Government.

I have read the term “a crusty old bachelor” and would be willing to say that that describes me so long as the crust goes all the way through. I don’t like things soft in the center. Softness is no use in this hard world. I am like one of my mother’s biscuits.

My mother, Mrs. J. J. Sunn, died in Wichita, KS, in 1944, at the age of 79. She was a fine woman and my experience of women in general does not apply to her in particular.

Since they invented the kind of biscuits that come in a tube which you hit on the edge of the counter and the dough explodes out of it under pressure, that’s the kind I buy, and by baking them about one half hour they come out pretty much the way I like them, crust clear through. I used to bake the dough all of a piece, but then discovered that you can break it apart into separate biscuits. I don’t hold with reading directions and they are always printed in small, fine print on the damn foil which gets torn when you break open the tube. I use my mother’s glasses. They are a good make.

The woman I came here after in 1949 is still here. That was during my brief period of infatuation. Fortunately I can say that she did not get her hooks onto me in the end. Some other men

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have not been as lucky. She has married or as good as several times and was pregnant and pushing a baby carriage for decades. Sometimes I think everybody under forty in this town is one of Edna’s. I had a very narrow escape. I have had a dream about Edna several times. In this dream I am out on the sea fishing for salmon from a small boat, and Edna swims up from the sea waves and tries to climb into the boat. To prevent this I hit her hands with the gutting knife and cut off the fingers, which fall into the water and turn into some kind of little creatures that swim away. I never can tell if they are babies or seals. Then Edna swims after them making a strange noise, and I see that in actuality she is a kind of seal or sea lion, like the big ones in the cave on the south coast, light brown and very large and fat and sleek in the water.

This dream disturbs me, as it is unfair. I am not the kind of man who would do such a thing. It causes me discomfort to remember the strange noise she makes in the dream, when I am in the grocery store and Edna is at the cash register. To make sure she rings it up right and I get the right change, I have to look at her hands opening and shutting the drawers and her fingers working on the keys. What’s wrong with women is that you can’t count on them. They are not fully civilised.

Roger Hiddenstone

I only come into town sometimes. It’s a now and then thing. If the road takes me there, fine, but I don’t go hunting for it. I run a two hundred thousand acre cattle ranch, which gives me a good deal to do. I’ll look up sometimes and the moon is new that I saw full last night. One summer comes after another like steers through a chute. In the winters, though, sometimes the weeks freeze like the creek water, and things hold still for a while. The air can get still and clear in the winter here in the high desert. I have seen the mountain peaks from Baker and Rainier in the north, Hood and Jefferson, Three-Fingered Jack and the Sisters east of here, on south to Shasta and Lassen, all standing up in the

Ether, OR

sunlight for eight hundred or a thousand miles. That was when I was flying. From the ground you can’t see that much of the ground, though you can see the rest of the universe, nights.

I traded in my two-seater Cessna for a quarterhorse mare, and I generally keep a Ford pickup, though at times I’ve had a Chevrolet. Any one of them will get me in to town so long as there isn’t more than a couple feet of snow on the road. I like to come in now and then and have a Denver omelette at the cafe for breakfast, and a visit with my wife and son. I have a drink at the Two Blue Moons, and spend the night at the motel. By the next morning I’m ready to go back to the ranch to find out what went wrong while I was gone. It’s always something.

Edna was only out to the ranch once while we were married. She spent three weeks. We were so busy in the bed I don’t recall much else about it, except the time she tried to learn to ride. I put her on Sally, the cutting horse I traded the Cessna plus fifteen hundred dollars for, a highly reliable horse and more intelligent than most Republicans. But Edna had that mare morally corrupted within ten minutes. I was trying to explain how she’d interpret what you did with your knees, when Edna started yip-ping and raking her like a bronc rider. They lit out of the yard and went halfway to Ontario at a dead run. I was riding the old roan gelding and only met them coming back. Sally was unrepentant, but Edna was sore and delicate that evening. She claimed all the love had been jolted out of her. I guess that this was true, in the larger sense, since it wasn’t long after that that she asked to go back to Ether. I thought she had quit her job at the grocery, but she had only asked for a month off, and she said Needless would want her for the extra business at Christmas. We drove back to town, finding it a little west of where we had left it, in a very pretty location near the Ochoco Mountains, and we had a happy Christmas season in Edna’s house with the children.

I don’t know whether Archie was begotten there or at the ranch. I’d like to think it was at the ranch so that there would be

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that in him drawing him to come back some day. I don’t know who to leave all this to. Charlie Echeverria is good with the stock, but can’t think ahead two days and couldn’t deal with the buyers, let alone the corporations. I don’t want the corporations profiting from this place. The hands are nice young fellows, but they don’t stay put, or want to. Cowboys don’t want land. Land owns you. You have to give in to that. I feel sometimes like all the stones on two hundred thousand acres were weighing on me, and my mind’s gone to rimrock. And the beasts wandering and calling across all that land. The cows stand with their young calves in the wind that blows March snow like frozen sand across the flats. Their patience is a thing I try to understand.

Grade Fane

I saw that old rancher on Main Street yesterday, Mr. Hiddenstone, was married to Edna once. He acted like he knew where he was going, but when the street ran out onto the sea cliff he sure did look foolish. Turned round and came back in those high-heel boots, long legs, putting his feet down like a cat the way cowboys do. He’s a skinny old man. He went into the Two Blue Moons. Going to try to drink his way back to eastern Oregon, I guess. I don’t care if this town is east or west. I don’t care if it’s anywhere. It never is anywhere anyway. I’m going to leave here and go to Portland, to the Intermountain, the big trucking company, and be a truck driver. I learned to drive when I was five on my grandpa’s tractor. When I was ten I started driving my dad’s Dodge Ram, and I’ve driven pickups and delivery vans for Mom and Mr. Needless ever since I got my license. Jase gave me lessons on his eighteen-wheeler last summer. I did real good. I’m a natural. Jase said so. I never got to get out onto the 1-5 but only once or twice, though. He kept saying I needed more practice pulling over and parking and shifting up and down. I didn’t mind practicing, but then when I got her stopped he’d want to get me into this bed thing he fixed up behind the seats and pull my jeans off, and

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we had to screw some before he’d go on teaching me anything. My own idea would be to drive a long way and learn a lot and then have some sex and coffee and then drive back a different way, maybe on hills where I’d have to practice braking and stuff. But I guess men have different priorities. Even when I was driving he’d have his arm around my back and be petting my boobs. He has these huge hands can reach right across both boobs at once. It felt good, but it interfered with his concentration teaching me. He would say Oh baby you’re so great and I would think he meant I was driving great but then he’d start making those sort of groaning noises and I’d have to shift down and find a place to pull out and get in the bed thing again. I used to practice changing gears in my mind when we were screwing and it helped. I could shift him right up and down again. I used to yell Going eighty! when I got him really shifted up. Fuzz on your tail! And make these sireen noises. That’s my CB name: Sireen. Jase got his route shifted in August. I made my plans then. I’m driving for the grocery and saving money till I’m seventeen and go to Portland to work for the Intermountain Company. I want to drive the 1-5 from Seattle to LA, or get a run to Salt Lake City. Till I can buy my own truck. I got it planned out.

Tobinye Walker

The young people all want to get out of Ether. Young Americans in a small town want to get up and go. And some do, and some come to a time when they stop talking about where they’re going to go when they go. They have come to where they are. Their problem, if it’s a problem, isn’t all that different from mine. We have a window of opportunity, it closes. I used to walk across the years as easy as a child here crosses the street, but I went lame, and had to stop walking. So this is my time, my heyday, my floruit.

When I first knew Edna she said a strange thing to me; we had been talking, I don’t remember what about, and she stopped

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and gazed at me. “You have a look on you like an unborn child,” she said. “You look at things like an unborn child.” I don’t know what I answered, and only later did I wonder how she knew how an unborn child looks, and whether she meant a fetus in the womb or a child that never came to be conceived. Maybe she meant a newborn child. But I think she used the word she meant to use.

When I first stopped by here, before my accident, there was no town, of course, no settlement. Several peoples came through and sometimes encamped for a season, but it was a range without boundary, though it had names. At that time people didn’t have the expectation of stability they have now; they knew that so long as a river keeps running it’s a river. Nobody but the beavers built dams, then. Ether always covered a lot of territory, and it has retained that property. But its property is not continuous.

The people I used to meet coming through generally said they came down Humbug Creek from the river in the mountains, but Ether itself never has been in the Cascades, to my knowledge. Fairly often you can see them to the west of it, though usually it’s west of them, and often west of the Coast Range in the timber or the dairy country, sometimes right on the sea. It has a broken range. It’s an unusual place. I’d like to go back to the center to tell about it, but I can’t walk any more. I have to do my flourishing here.

J. Needless

People think there are no Californians. Nobody can come from the promise land. You have to be going to it. Die in the desert, grave by the wayside. I come from California, born there, think about it some. I was born in the Valley of San Arcadio. Orchards. Like a white bay of orange flowers under bare blue-brown mountains. Sunlight like air, like clear water, something you lived in, an element. Our place was a little farmhouse up in the foothills, looking out over the valley. My father was a manager

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for one of the companies. Oranges flower white, with a sweet, fine scent. Outskirts of Heaven, my mother said once, one morning when she was hanging out the wash. I remember her saying that. We live on the outskirts of Heaven.

She died when I was six and I don’t remember a lot but that about her. Now I have come to realise that my wife has been dead so long that I have lost her too. She died when our daughter Corrie was six. Seemed like there was some meaning in it at the time, but if there was I didn’t find it.

Ten years ago when Corrie was twenty-one she said she wanted to go to Disneyland for her birthday. With me. Damn if she didn’t drag me down there. Spent a good deal to see people dressed up like mice with water on the brain and places made to look like places they weren’t. I guess that is the point there. They clean dirt till it is a sanitary substance and spread it out to look like dirt so you don’t have to touch dirt. You and Walt are in control there. You can be in any kind of place, space or the ocean or castles in Spain, all sanitary, no dirt. I would have liked it as a boy, when I thought the idea was to run things. Changed my ideas, settled for a grocery.

Corrie wanted to see where I grew up, so we drove over to San Arcadio. It wasn’t there, not what I meant by it. Nothing but roofs, houses, streets and houses. Smog so thick it hid the mountains and the sun looked green. God damn, get me out of there, I said, they have changed the color of the sun. Corrie wanted to look for the house but I was serious. Get me out of here, I said, this is the right place but the wrong year. Walt Disney can get rid of the dirt on his property if he likes, but this is going too far. This is my property.

I felt like that. Like I thought it was something I had, but they scraped all the dirt off and underneath was cement and some electronic wiring. I’d as soon not have seen that. People come through here say how can you stand living in a town that doesn’t stay in the same place all the time, but have they been to Los Angeles? It’s anywhere you want to say it is.

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Well, since I don’t have California what have I got? A good enough business. Corrie’s still here. Good head on her. Talks a lot. Runs that bar like a bar should be run. Runs her husband pretty well too. What do I mean when I say I had a mother, I had a wife? I mean remembering what orange flowers smell like, whiteness, sunlight. I carry that with me. Corinna and Silvia, I carry their names. But what do I have?

What I don’t have is right within hand’s reach every day. Every day but Sunday. But I can’t reach out my hand. Every man in town gave her a child and all I ever gave her was her week’s wages. I know she trusts me. That’s the trouble. Too late now. Hell, what would she want me in her bed for, the Medicare benefits?

Emma Eodely

Everything is serial killers now. They say everyone is naturally fascinated by a man planning and committing one murder after another without the least reason and not even knowing who he kills personally. There was the man up in the city recently who tortured and tormented three tiny little boys arid took photographs of them while he tortured them and of their corpses after he killed them. Authorities are talking now about what they ought to do with these photographs. They could make a lot of money from a book of them. He was apprehended by the police as he lured yet another tiny boy to come with him, as in a nightmare. There were men in California and Texas and I believe Chicago who dismembered and buried innumerably. Then of course it goes back in history to Jack the Ripper who killed poor women and was supposed to be a member of the Royal Family of England, and no doubt before his time there were many other serial killers, many of them members of Royal Families or Emperors and Generals who killed thousands and thousands of people. But in wars they kill people more or less simultaneously, not one by one, so that they are mass murderers, not serial killers, but I’m not sure

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I see the difference, really. Since for the person being murdered it only happens once.

I should be surprised if we had a serial killer in Ether. Most of the men were soldiers in one of the wars, but they would be mass murderers, unless they had desk jobs. I can’t think who here would be a serial killer. No doubt I would be the last to find out. I find being invisible works both ways. Often I don’t see as much as I used to when I was visible. Being invisible however I’m less likely to become a serial victim.

It’s odd how the natural fascination they talk about doesn’t include the serial victims. I suppose it is because I taught young children for thirty-five years, but perhaps I am unnatural, because I think about those three little boys. They were three or four years old. How strange that their whole life was only a few years, like a cat. In their world suddenly instead of their mother there was a man who told them how he was going to hurt them and then did it, so that there was nothing in their life at all but fear and pain. So they died in fear and pain. But all the reporters tell is the nature of the mutilations and how decomposed they were, and that’s all about them. They were little boys not men. They are not fascinating. They are just dead. But the serial killer they tell all about over and over and discuss his psychology and how his parents caused him to be so fascinating, and he lives forever, as witness Jack the Ripper and Hitler the Ripper. Everyone around here certainly remembers the name of the man who serially raped and photographed the tortured little boys before he serially murdered them. He was named Westley Dodd but what were their names?

Of course we the people murdered him back. That was what he wanted. He wanted us to murder him. I cannot decide if hanging him was a mass murder or a serial murder. We all did it, like a war, so it is a mass murder, but we each did it, democratically, so I suppose it is serial, too. I would as soon be a serial victim as a serial murderer, but I was not given the choice.

My choices have become less. I never had a great many, as my

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sexual impulses were not appropriate to my position in life, and no one I fell in love with knew it. I am glad when Ether turns up in a different place as it is kind of like a new choice of where to live, only I didn’t have to make it. I am capable only of very small choices. What to eat for breakfast, oatmeal or corn flakes, or perhaps only a piece of fruit? Kiwi fruits were fifteen cents apiece at the grocery and I bought half a dozen. A while ago they were the most exotic thing, from New Zealand I think and a dollar each, and now they raise them all over the Willamette Valley. But then, the Willamette Valley may be quite exotic to a person in New Zealand. I like the way they’re cool in your mouth, the same way the flesh of them looks cool, a smooth green you can see into, like jade stone. I still see things like that perfectly clearly. It’s only with people that my eyes are more and more transparent, so that I don’t always see what they’re doing, and so that they can look right through me as if my eyes were air and say, “Hi, Emma, how’s life treating you?”

Life’s treating me like a serial victim, thank you.

I wonder if she sees me or sees through me. I don’t dare look. She is shy and lost in her crystal dreams. If only I could look after her. She needs looking after. A cup of tea. Herbal tea, echinacea maybe, I think her immune system needs strengthening. She is not a practical person. I am a very practical person. Far below her dreams.

Lo still sees me. Of course Lo is a serial killer as far as birds are concerned, and moles, but although it upsets me when the bird’s not dead yet it’s not the same as the man taking photographs. Mr. Hiddenstone once told me that cats have the instinct to let a mouse or bird stay alive awhile in order to take it to the kittens and train them to hunt, so what seems to be cruelty is thoughtfulness. Now I know that some torn cats kill kittens, and I don’t think any torn ever raised kittens and trained them thoughtfully to hunt. The queen cat does that. A torn cat is the Jack the Ripper of the Royal Family. But Lo is neutered, so he

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might behave like a queen or at least like a kind of uncle if there were kittens around, and bring them his birds to hunt. I don’t know. He doesn’t mix with other cats much. He stays pretty close to home, keeping an eye on the birds and moles and me. I know that my invisibility is not universal when I wake up in the middle of the night and Lo is sitting on the bed right beside my pillow purring and looking very intently at me. It’s a strange thing to do, a little uncanny. His eyes wake me, I think. But it’s a good waking, knowing that he can see me, even in the dark.

Edna

All right now, I want an answer. All my life since I was fourteen I have been making my soul. I don’t know what else to call it, that’s what I called it then, when I was fourteen and came into the possession of my life and the knowledge of my responsibility. Since then I have not had time to find a better name for it. The word responsible means that you have to answer. You can’t not answer. You’d might rather not answer, but you have to. When you answer you are making your soul, so that it has a shape to it, and size, and some staying power. I understood that, I came into that knowledge, when I was thirteen and early fourteen, that long winter in the Siskiyous. All right, so ever since then, more or less, I have worked according to that understanding. And I have worked. I have done what came into my hands to do, and I’ve done it the best I could and with all the mind and strength I had to give to it. There have been jobs, waitressing and clerking, but first of all and always the ordinary work of raising the children and keeping the house so that people can live decently and in health and some degree of peace of mind. Then there is responding to the needs of men. That seems like it should come first. People might say I never thought of anything but answering what men asked, pleasing men and pleasing myself, and goodness knows such questions are a joy to answer if asked by a pleasant man. But in the order of my mind, the children come before the fathers of the children.

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Maybe I see it that way because I was the eldest daughter and there were four younger than me and my father had gone off. Well, all right then, those are my responsibilities as I see them, those are the questions I have tried always to answer: can people live in this house, and how does a child grow up rightly, and how to be trustworthy.

But now I have my own question. I never asked questions, I was so busy answering them, but am sixty years old this winter and think I should have time for a question. But it’s hard to ask. Here it is. It’s like all the time I was working keeping house and raising the kids and making love and earning our keep I thought there was going to come a time or there would be some place where all of it all came together. Like it was words I was saying, all my life, all the kinds of work, just a word here and a word there, but finally all the words would make a sentence, and I could read the sentence. I would have made my soul and know what it was for.

But I have made my soul and I don’t know what to do with it. Who wants it? I have lived sixty years. All I’ll do from now on is the same as what I have done only less of it, while I get weaker and sicker and smaller all the time, shrinking and shrinking around myself, and die. No matter what I did, or made, or know. The words don’t mean anything. I ought to talk with Emma about this. She’s the only one who doesn’t say stuff like, “You’re only as old as you think you are,” “Oh Edna you’ll never be old,” rubbish like that. Toby Walker wouldn’t talk that way either, but he doesn’t say much at all any more. Keeps his sentence to himself. My kids that still live here, Archie and Sook, they don’t want to hear anything about it. Nobody young can afford to believe in getting old.

So is all the responsibility you take only useful then, but no use laterdisposable? What’s the use, then? All the work you did is just gone. It doesn’t make anything. But I may be wrong. I hope so, I would like to have more trust in dying. Maybe it’s worth while, like some kind of answering, coming into another place.

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Like I felt that winter in the Siskiyous, walking on the snow road between black firs under all the stars, that I was the same size as the universe, the same thing as the universe. And if I kept on walking ahead there was this glory waiting for me. In time I would come into glory. I knew that. So that’s what I made my soul for. I made it for glory.

And I have known a good deal of glory. I’m not ungrateful. But it doesn’t last. It doesn’t come together to make a place where you can live, a house. It’s gone and the years go. What’s left? Shrinking and forgetting and thinking about aches and acid indigestion and cancers and pulse rates and bunions until the whole world is a room that smells like urine, is that what all the work comes to, is that the end of the babies’ kicking legs, the children’s eyes, the loving hands, the wild rides, the light on water, the stars over the snow? Somewhere inside it all there has to still be the glory.

Ervin Muth

I have been watching Mr. “Toby” Walker for a good while, checking up on things, and if I happened to be called upon to I could state with fair certainty that this “Mr. Walker” is not an American. My research has taken me considerably farther afield than that. But there are these “gray areas” or some things which many people as a rule are unprepared to accept. It takes training.

My attention was drawn to these kind of matters in the first place by scrutinizing the town records on an entirely different subject of research. Suffice it to say that I was checking the title on the Fane place at the point in time when Mrs. Osey Jean Fane put the property into the hands of Ervin Muth Relaty, of which I am proprietor. There had been a dispute concerning the property line on the east side of the Fane property in 1939 into which, due to being meticulous concerning these kind of detailed responsibilities, I checked. To my surprise I was amazed to discover that the adjoining lot, which had been developed in 1906, had been in the

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name of Tobinye Walker since that date, 1906! I naturally assumed at that point in time that this “Tobinye Walker” was “Mr. Toby Walker’s” father and thought little more about the issue until my researches into another matter, concerning the Essel/Emmer lots, in the town records indicated that the name “Tobinye Walker” was shown as purchaser of a livery stable on that site (on Main St. between Rash St. and Goreman Ave.) in 1880.

While purchasing certain necessaries in the Needless Grocery Store soon after, I encountered Mr. Walker in person. I remarked in a jocular vein that I had been meeting his father and grandfather. This was of course a mere pleasantry. Mr. “Toby” Walker responded in what struck me as a suspicious fashion. There was some taking aback going on. Although with laughter. His exact words, to which I can attest, were the following: “I had no idea that you were capable of travelling in time!”

This was followed by my best efforts to seriously inquire concerning the persons of his same name which my researches in connection with my work as a relator had turned up. These were only met with facetious remarks such as, “I’ve lived here quite a while, you see,” and, “Oh, I remember when Lewis and Clark came through,” a statement in reference to the celebrated explorers of the Oregon Trail, who I ascertained later to have been in Oregon in 1806.

Soon after, Mr. Toby Walker “walked” away, thus ending the conversation.

I am convinced by evidence that “Mr. Walker” is an illegal immigrant from a foreign country who has assumed the name of a Founding Father of this fine community, that is to wit the Tobinye Walker who purchased the livery stable in 1880. I have my reasons.

My research shows conclusively that the Lewis and Clark Expedition sent by President Thos. Jefferson did not pass through any of the localities which our fine community of Ether has occupied over the course of its history. Ether never got that far north.

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If Ether is to progress to fulfill its destiny as a Destination Resort on the beautiful Oregon Coast and Desert as I visualize it with a complete downtown entertainment center and entrepreneurial business community, including hub motels, RV facilities, and a Theme Park, the kind of thing that is represented by “Mr.” Walker will have to go. It is the American way to buy and sell houses and properties continually in the course of moving for the sake of upward mobility and self-improvement. Stagnation is the enemy of the American way. The same person owning the same property since 1906 is unnatural and Unamerican. Ether is an American town and moves all the time. That is its destiny. I can call myself an expert.

Starra Walinow Amethyst

I keep practicing love. I was in love with that French actor Gerard but it’s really hard to say his last name. Frenchmen attract me. When I watch Star Trek The Next Generation reruns I’m in love with Captain Jean-Luc Picard, but I can’t stand Commander Riker. I used to be in love with Heathcliff when I was twelve and Miss Freff gave me Wuthering Heights to read. And I was in love with Sting for a while before he got weirder. Sometimes I think I am in love with Lieutenant Worf but that is pretty weird, with all those sort of wrinkles and horns on his forehead, since he’s a Klingon, but that’s not really what’s weird. I mean it’s just in the TV that he’s an alien. Really he is a human named Michael Dorn. That is so weird to me. I mean I never have seen a real black person except in movies and TV. Everybody in Ether is white. So a black person would actually be an alien here. I thought what it would be like if somebody like that came into like the drug store, really tall, with that dark brown skin and dark eyes and those very soft lips that look like they could get hurt so easily, and asked for something in that really, really deep voice. Like, “Where would I find the aspirin?” And I would show him where the aspirin kind of stuff is. He would be standing beside me in front of the shelf,

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really big and tall and dark, and I’d feel warmth coming out of him like out of an iron woodstove. He’d say to me in a very low voice, “I don’t belong in this town,” and I’d say back, “I don’t either,” and he’d say, “Do you want to come with me?” only really really nicely, not like a come-on but like two prisoners whispering how to get out of prison together. I’d nod, and he’d say, “Back of the gas station, at dusk.”

At dusk.

I love that word. Dusk. It sounds like his voice.

Sometimes I feel weird thinking about him like this. I mean because he is actually real. If it was just Worf, that’s OK, because Worf is just this alien in some old reruns of a show. But there is actually Michael Dorn. So thinking about him in a sort of story that way makes me uncomfortable sometimes, because it’s like I was making him a toy, something I can do anything with, like a doll. That seems like it was unfair to him. And it makes me sort of embarrassed when I think about how he actually has his own life with nothing to do with this dumb girl in some hick town he never heard of. So I try to make up somebody else to make that kind of stories about. But it doesn’t work.

I really tried this spring to be in love with Morrie Stromberg, but it didn’t work. He’s really beautiful-looking. It was when I saw him shooting baskets that I thought maybe I could be in love with him. His legs and arms are long and smooth and he moves smooth and looks kind of like a mountain lion, with a low forehead and short dark blond hair, tawny colored. But all he ever does is hang out with Joe’s crowd and talk about sport scores and cars, and once in class he was talking with Joe about me so I could hear, like, “Oh yeah Starra, wow, she reads books” not really mean, but kind of like I was like an alien from another planet, just totally absolutely strange. Like Worf or Michael Dorn would feel here. Like he meant OK, it’s OK to be like that only not here. Somewhere else, OK? As if Ether wasn’t already somewhere else. I mean, didn’t it use to be the Indians that lived here, and now

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there aren’t any of them either? So who belongs here and where does it belong?

About a month ago Mom told me the reason she left my father. I don’t remember anything like that. I don’t remember any father. I don’t remember anything before Ether. She says we were living in Seattle and they had a store where they sold crystals and oils and New Age stuff, and when she got up one night to go to the bathroom he was in my room holding me. She wanted to tell me everything about how he was holding me and stuff, but I just went, “So, like, he was molesting me.” And she went, “Yeah,” and I said, “So what did you do?” I thought they would have had a big fight. But she said she didn’t say anything, because she was afraid of him. She said, “See, to him it was like he owned me and you. And when I didn’t go along with that, he would get real crazy.” I think they were into a lot of pot and heavy stuff, she talks about that sometimes. So anyway next day when he went to the store she just took some of the crystals and stuff they kept at home, we still have them, and got some money they kept in a can in the kitchen just like she does here, and got on the bus to Portland with me. Somebody she met there gave us a ride here. I don’t remember any of that. It’s like I was born here. I asked did he ever try to look for her, and she said she didn’t know but if he did he’d have a hard time finding her here. She changed her last name to Amethyst, which is her favorite stone. Walinow was her real name. She says it’s Polish.

I don’t know what his name was. I don’t know what he did. I don’t care. It’s like nothing happened. I’m never going to belong to anybody.

What I know is this, I am going to love people. They will never know it. But I am going to be a great lover. I know how. I have practiced. It isn’t when you belong to somebody or they belong to you or stuff. That’s like Chelsey getting married to Tim because she wanted to have the wedding and the husband and a no-wax kitchen floor. She wanted stuff to belong to.

I don’t want stuff, but I want practice. Like we live in this

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shack with no kitchen let alone a no-wax floor, and we cook on a trashburner, with a lot of crystals around, and cat pee from the strays Mom takes in, and Mom does stuff like sweeping out for Myrella’s beauty parlor, and gets zits because she eats Hostess Twinkies instead of food. Mom needs to get it together. But I need to give it away.

I thought maybe the way to practice love was to have sex so I had sex with Danny last summer. Mom bought us condoms and made me hold hands with her around a bayberry candle and talk about the Passage Into Womanhood. She wanted Danny to be there too but I talked her out of it. The sex was OK but what I was really trying to do was be in love. It didn’t work. Maybe it was the wrong way. He just got used to getting sex and so he kept coming around all fall, going “Hey Starra baby you know you need it.” He wouldn’t even say that it was him that needed it. If I need it, I can do it a lot better myself than he can. I didn’t tell him that. Although I nearly did when he kept not letting me alone after I told him to stop. If he hadn’t finally started going with Dana I might would have told him.

I don’t know anybody else here I can be in love with. I wish I could practice on Archie but what’s the use while there’s Gracie Fane? It would just be dumb. I thought about asking Archie’s father Mr. Hiddenstone if I could work on his ranch, next time we get near it. I could still come see Mom, and maybe there would be like ranch hands or cowboys. Or Archie would come out sometimes and there wouldn’t be Gracie. Or actually there’s Mr. Hiddenstone. He looks like Archie. Actually handsomer. But I guess is too old. He has a face like the desert. I noticed his eyes are the same color as Mom’s turquoise ring. But I don’t know if he needs a cook or anything and I suppose fifteen is too young.

J. Needless

Never have figured out where the Hohovars come from. Somebody said White Russia. That figures. They’re all big and

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tall and heavy with hair so blond it’s white and those little blue eyes. They don’t look at you. Noses like new potatoes. Women don’t talk. Kids don’t talk. Men talk like, “Vun case yeast peggets, tree case piggle beet.” Never say hello, never say goodbye, never say thanks. But honest. Pay right up in cash. When they come in town they’re all dressed head to foot, the women in these long dresses with a lot of fancy stuff around the bottom and sleeves, the little girls just the same as the women, even the babies in the same long stiff skirts, all of them with bonnet things that hide their hair. Even the babies don’t look up. Men and boys in long pants and shirt and coat even when it’s desert here and a hundred and five in July. Something like those ammish folk on the east coast, I guess. Only the Hohovars have buttons. A lot of buttons. The vest things the women wear have about a thousand buttons. Men’s flies the same. Must slow ‘em down getting to the action. But everybody says buttons are no problem when they get back to their community. Everything off. Strip naked to go to their church. Tom Sunn swears to it, and Corrie says she used to sneak out there more than once on Sunday with a bunch of other kids to see the Hohovars all going over the hill buck naked, singing in their language. That would be some sight, all those tall, heavy-fleshed, white-skinned, big-ass, big-tit women parading over the hill. Barefoot, too. What the hell they do in church I don’t know. Tom says they commit fornication but Tom Sunn don’t know shit from a hole in the ground. All talk. Nobody I know has ever been over that hill.

Some Sundays you can hear them singing.

Now religion is a curious thing in America. According to the Christians there is only one of anything. On the contrary there seems to me to be one or more of everything. Even here in Ether we have, that I know of, Baptists of course, Methodists, Church of Christ, Lutheran, Presbyterian, Catholic though no church in town, a Quaker, a lapsed Jew, a witch, the Hohovars, and the gurus or whatever that lot in the grange are. This is not counting

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most people, who have no religious affiliation except on impulse.

That is a considerable variety for a town this size. What’s more, they try out each other’s churches, switch around. Maybe the nature of the town makes us restless. Anyhow people in Ether generally live a long time, though not as long as Toby Walker. We have time to try out different things. My daughter Corrie has been a Baptist as a teen-ager, a Methodist while in love with Jim Fry, then had a go at the Lutherans. She was married Methodist but is now the Quaker, having read a book. This may change, as lately she has been talking to the witch, Pearl W. Amethyst, and reading another book, called Crystals and You.

Edna says the book is all tosh. But Edna has a harder mind than most.

Edna is my religion, I guess. I was converted years ago.

As for the people in the grange, the guru people, they caused some stir when they arrived ten years ago, or is it twenty now. Maybe it was in the sixties. Seems like they’ve been there a long time when I think about it. My wife was still alive. Anyhow, that’s a case of religion mixed up some way with politics, not that it isn’t always.

When they came to Ether they had a hell of a lot of money to throw around, though they didn’t throw much my way. Bought the old grange and thirty acres of pasture adjacent. Put a fence right round and God damn if they didn’t electrify that fence. I don’t mean the little jolt you might run in for steers but a kick would kill an elephant. Remodeled the old grange and built on barns and barracks and even a generator. Everybody inside the fence was to share everything in common with everybody else inside the fence. Though from outside the fence it looked like the guru shared a lot more of it than the rest of ‘em. That was the political part. Socialism. The bubonic socialism. Rats carry it and there is no vaccine. I tell you people here were upset. Thought the whole population behind the iron curtain plus all the hippies in California were moving in next Tuesday. Talked about bringing in

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the National Guard to defend the rights of citizens. Personally I’d of preferred the hippies over the National Guard. Hippies were unarmed. They killed by smell alone, as people said. But at the time there was a siege mentality here. A siege inside the grange, with their electric fence and their socialism, and a siege outside the grange, with their rights of citizens to be white and not foreign and not share anything with anybody.

At first the guru people would come into the town in their orange color T-shirts, doing a little shopping, talking politely. Young people got invited into the grange. They were calling it the osh rom by then. Corrie told me about the altar with the marigolds and the big photograph of Guru Jaya Jaya Jaya. But they weren’t really friendly people and they didn’t get friendly treatment. Pretty soon they never came into town, just drove in and out the road gate in their orange Buicks. Sometime along in there the Guru Jaya Jaya Jaya was supposed to come from India to visit the osh rom. Never did. Went to South America instead and founded an osh rom for old Nazis, they say. Old Nazis probably have more money to share with him than young Oregonians do. Or maybe he came to find his osh rom and it wasn’t where they told him.

It has been kind of depressing to see the T-shirts fade and the Buicks break down. I don’t guess there’s more than two Buicks and ten, fifteen people left in the osh rom. They still grow garden truck, eggplants, all kinds of peppers, greens, squash, tomatoes, corn, beans, blue and rasp and straw and marion berries, melons. Good quality stuff. Raising crops takes some skill here where the climate will change overnight. They do beautiful irrigation and don’t use poisons. Seen them out there picking bugs off the plants by hand. Made a deal with them some years ago to supply my produce counter and have not regretted it. Seems like Ether is meant to be a self-sufficient place. Every time I’d get a routine set up with a supplier in Cottage Grove or Prineville, we’d switch. Have to call up and say sorry, we’re on the other side of the moun-117

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tains again this week, cancel those cantaloupes. Dealing with the guru people is easier. They switch along with us.

What they believe in aside from organic gardening I don’t know. Seems like the Guru Jaya Jaya Jaya would take some strenuous believing, but people can put their faith in anything, I guess. Hell, I believe in Edna.

Archie Hiddenstone

Dad got stranded in town again last week. He hung around awhile to see if the range would move back east, finally drove his old Ford over to Eugene and up the McKenzie River highway to get back to the ranch. Said he’d like to stay but Charlie Echeverria would be getting into some kind of trouble if he did. He just doesn’t like to stay away from the place more than a night or two. It’s hard on him when we turn up way over here on the coast like this.

I know he wishes I’d go back with him. I guess I ought to. I ought to live with him. I could see Mama every time Ether was over there. It isn’t that. I ought to get it straight in my mind what I want to do. I ought to go to college. I ought to get out of this town. I ought to get away.

I don’t think Gracie ever actually has seen me. I don’t do anything she can see. I don’t drive a semi.

I ought to learn. If I drove a truck she’d see me. I could come through Ether off the 1-5 or down from 84, wherever. Like that shit kept coming here last summer she was so crazy about. Used to come into the Seven-Eleven all the time for Gatorade. Called me Boy. Hey boy gimme the change in quarters. She’d be sitting up in his eighteen-wheeler playing with the gears. She never came in. Never even looked. I used to think maybe she was sitting there with her jeans off. Bareass on that truck seat. I don’t know why I thought that. Maybe she was.

I don’t want to drive a God damn stinking semi or try to feed a bunch of steers in a God damn desert either or sell God damn Hostess Twinkles to crazy women with purple hair either. I ought

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to go to college. Learn something. Drive a sports car. A Miata. Am I going to sell Gatorade to shits all my life? I ought to be somewhere that is somewhere.

I dreamed the moon was paper and I lit a match and set fire to it. It flared up just like a newspaper and started dropping down fire on the roofs, scraps of burning. Mama came out of the grocery and said, “That’ll take the ocean.” Then I woke up. I heard the ocean where the sagebrush hills had been.

I wish I could make Dad proud of me anywhere but the ranch. But that’s the only place he lives. He won’t ever ask me to come live there. He knows I can’t. I ought to.

Edna

Oh how my children tug at my soul just as they tugged at my breasts, so that I want to yell Stop! I’m dry! You drank me dry years ago! Poor sweet stupid Archie. What on earth to do for him. His father found the desert he needed. All Archie’s found is a tiny little oasis he’s scared to leave.

I dreamed the moon was paper, and Archie came out of the house with a box of matches and tried to set it afire, and I was frightened and ran into the sea.

Ady came out of the sea. There were no tracks on that beach that morning except his, coming up towards me from the breaker line. I keep thinking about the men lately. I keep thinking about Needless. I don’t know why. I guess because I never married him. Some of them I wonder why I did, how it came about. There’s no reason in it. Who’d ever have thought I’d ever sleep with Tom Sunn? But how could I go on saying no to a need like that? His fly bust every time he saw me across the street. Sleeping with him was like sleeping in a cave. Dark, uncomfortable, echoes, bears farther back in. Bones. But a fire burning. Tom’s true soul is that fire burning, but he’ll never know it. He starves the fire and smothers it with wet ashes, he makes himself the cave where he sits on cold ground gnawing bones. Women’s bones.

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But Mollie is a brand snatched from his burning. I miss Mollie. Next time we’re over east again I’ll go up to Pendleton and see her and the grandbabies. She doesn’t come. Never did like the way Ether ranges. She’s a stayputter. Says all the moving around would make the children insecure. It didn’t make her insecure in any harmful way that I can see. It’s her Eric that would disapprove. He’s a snob. Prison clerk; What a job. Walk out of a place every night where the others are all locked in, how’s that for a ball and chain? Sink you if you ever tried to swim.

Where did Ady swim up from I wonder? Somewhere deep. Once he said he was Greek, once he said he worked on a Australian ship, once he said he had lived on an island in the Philippines where they speak a language nobody else anywhere speaks, once he said he was born in a canoe at sea. It could all have been true. Or not. Maybe Archie should go to sea. Join the Navy or the Coast Guard. But no, he’d drown.

Tad knows he’ll never drown. He’s Ady’s son, he can breathe water. I wonder where Tad is now. That is a tugging too, that not knowing, not knowing where the child is, an aching pull you stop noticing because it never stops. But sometimes it turns you, you find you’re facing another direction, like your body was caught by the thorn of a blackberry, by an undertow. The way the moon pulls the tides.

I keep thinking about Archie, I keep thinking about Needless. Ever since I saw him look at Sook. I know what it is, it’s that other dream I had. Right after the one with Archie. I dreamed something, it’s hard to get hold of, something about being on this long long beach, like I was beached, yes, that’s it, I was stranded, and I couldn’t move. I was drying up and I couldn’t get back to the water. Then I saw somebody walking towards me from way far away down the beach. His tracks in the sand were ahead of him. Each time he stepped in one, in the footprint, it was gone when he lifted his foot. He kept coming straight to me and I knew if he got to me I could get back in the water and be all right. When he

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got close up I saw it was him. It was Needless. That’s an odd dream.

If Archie went to sea he’d drown. He’s a drylander, like his father.

Sookie, now, Sook is Toby Walker’s daughter. She knows it. She told me, once, I didn’t tell her. Sook goes her own way. I don’t know if he knows it. I don’t think so. She has my eyes and hair. And there were some other possibilities. And I never felt it was the right thing to tell a man unless he asked. Toby didn’t ask, because of what he believed about himself. But I knew the night, I knew the moment she was conceived. I felt the child to be leap in me like a fish leaping in the sea, a salmon coming up the river, leaping the rocks and rapids, shining. Toby had told me he couldn’t have children“not with any woman born,” he said, with a sorrowful look. He came pretty near telling me where he came from, that night. But I didn’t ask. Maybe because of what I believe about myself, that I only have the one life and no range, no freedom to walk in the hidden places.

Anyhow, I told him that that didn’t matter, because if I felt like it I could conceive by talcing thought. And for all I know that’s what happened. I thought Sookie and out she came, red as a salmon, quick and shining. She is the most beautiful child, girl, woman. What does she want to stay here in Ether for? Be an old maid teacher like Emma? Pump gas, give perms, clerk in the grocery? Who’ll she meet here? Well, God knows I met enough. I like it, she says, I like not knowing where I’ll wake up. She’s like me. But still there’s the tug, the dry longing. Oh, I guess I had too many children. I turn this way, that way, like a compass with forty Norths. Yet always going on the same way in the end. Fitting my feet into my footprints that disappear behind me.

It’s a long way down from the mountains. My feet hurt.

Tobinye Walker

Man is the animal that binds time, they say. I wonder. We’re bound by time, bounded by it. We move from a place to another

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place, but from a time to another time only in memory and intention, dream and prophecy. Yet time travels us. Uses us as its road, going on never stopping always in one direction. No exits off this freeway.

I say we because I am a naturalized citizen. I didn’t use to be a citizen at all. Time once was to me what my back yard is to Emma’s cat. No fences mattered, no boundaries. But I was forced to stop, to settle, to join. I am an American. I am a castaway. I came to grief.

I admit I’ve wondered if it’s my doing that Ether ranges, doesn’t stay put. An effect of my accident. When I lost the power to walk straight, did I impart a twist to the locality? Did it begin to travel because my travelling had ceased? If so, I can’t work out the mechanics of it. It’s logical, it’s neat, yet I don’t think it’s the fact. Perhaps I’m just dodging my responsibility. But to the best of my memory, ever since Ether was a town it’s always been a real American town, a place that isn’t where you left it. Even when you live there it isn’t where you think it is. It’s missing. It’s restless. It’s off somewhere over the mountains, making up in one dimension what it lacks in another. If it doesn’t keep moving the malls will catch it. Nobody’s surprised it’s gone. The white man’s his own burden. And nowhere to lay it down. You can leave town easy enough, but coming back is tricky. You come back to where you left it and there’s nothing but the parking lot for the new mall and a giant yellow grinning clown made of balloons. Is that all there was to it? Better not believe it, or that’s all you’ll ever have: blacktop and cinderblock and a blurred photograph of a little boy smiling. The child was murdered along with many others. There’s more to it than that, there is an old glory in it, but it’s hard to locate, except by accident. Only Roger Hiddenstone can come back when he wants to, riding his old Ford or his old horse, because Roger owns nothing but the desert and a true heart. And of course wherever Edna is, it is. It’s where she lives.

I’ll make my prophecy. When Starra and Roger lie in each

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other’s tender arms, she sixteen he sixty, when Gracie and Archie shake his pickup truck to pieces making love on the mattress in the back on the road out to the Hohovars, when Ervin Muth and Thomas Sunn get drunk with the farmers in the ashram and dance and sing and cry all night, when Emma Bodely and Pearl Amethyst gaze long into each other’s shining eyes among the cats, among the crystalsthat same night Needless the grocer will come at last to Edna. To him she will bear no child but joy. And orange trees will blossom in the streets of Ether.

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