Authors: Paulette Livers
Cementville
CEMENTVILLE
CEMENTVILLE
Copyright © 2014 Paulette Livers
Vietnamese poetry of Ho Xuan Hu'o'ng, who wrote around 1800, is used here in translation with permission of translator John Balaban. © John Balaban,
Ca Dao Vietnam: Vietnamese Folk Poetry
(Copper Canyon Press, 2003), and © John Balaban,
Spring Essence: The Poetry of Ho Xuan Huong
(Copper Canyon Press, 2000), reprinted by permission of the translator.
Earlier versions of portions of this text have appeared in
The Southwest Review
and the audio journal
Bound Off
.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission from the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available.
ISBN 978-1-61902-272-0
Cover design by Michael Kellner
Interior design by Domini Dragoone
Counterpoint Press
1919 Fifth Street
Berkeley, CA 94710
Distributed by Publishers Group West
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for David
Contents
Hear: Tell your children of it, and let your children tell their children, and their children another generation. What the swarming locust has left, the grasshopper has eaten. What the grasshopper has left, the caterpillar has eaten. A menace has come with the teeth of a lion to lay waste your land, Eden before them, a desolate wilderness behind, your trees and vines dead-white
.
â
P
ROPHETS:
J
OEL
REDUX
W
E FEEL THEM COMING, THE LOW VIBRATION OF THEIR
wheels, a dark convoy descending upon us, pitching north like a swarm lobbed from the fist of a spiteful deity. The military cortege moves toward us up the new toll road from Fort Campbell. Each black hearse with a small flag fluttering from its antenna, each containing a flag-draped coffin. See him, in front, the driver of the lead hearse? He no doubt finds the wide, flat road boring and wonders momentarily whether he needs to keep his eyes open at all, the thing is so damn straight.
We have wondered the same thingâsome of us have tried it out, closing our eyes and keeping the wheel steady, the gas pedal to the floor, our tires singing as we plunge headlong down that smooth, perfect surface. The lead hearse driver, let's call him Corporal So-and-So, stares ahead at this unswerving trail of asphalt and hears the smoky voice of his great aunt, quoter of Scripture:
Wide is the gate, and broad is the way, that leads to destruction, and many there be who go there
. He glances in the rearview at the long shiny box behind him. He did not know the kid in the box, not being from around here. One of the other drivers told him about the bad luck of the boys from Cementville.
Corporal So-and-So's car is the only one to also include a passenger with a pulse, and he wishes this fact did not make the road all the more lonesome. He glances sidelong at the newly saved POW hero in his dress blues, with his big square jaw clamped in pain, the
single leg restless, shifting around like it's looking for the gone one. Only thing spoken so far is moans. Finally So-and-So says, “You alright, sir?”
But the hero's eyes trace the passing cliffs, sheer limestone walls weeping rust-colored water from deep in the earth.
“Were you with the dead boys?” So-and-So asks. He knows better. The POW is a commissioned officer, West Point all the way, not from the National Guard like the boys who bought it. The driver is just trying to make conversation, only wishes to make the ride less tiresome. “Bet you're looking forward to the parade. All that home-cooked food,” he tries.
We don't have to be in that hearse to know there will be no response. The cells of us are familiars of the cells of Lieutenant Harlan O'Brien, and the cells of the dead boys degrading even now in their seven individual boxes. We know their lives and their deaths as we know our own. We know our own. Our own.
Some distance behind the line of hearses rolls a Greyhound, wherein GIs stretch in various states of repose and disengagement. Some sleep, a few pass a pint of Heaven Hill. There is an air of halfhearted celebration. Two GIs warily eye another soldier who sits off by himself, faking sleep.
One says, “He don't look old enough to even be in the army, much less getting out.”
The second GI says, “They say he kilt a man.”
First one says, “It's war. Ain't that the idea?”
Other says, “Kilt one of us. And it
wasn't
friendly fire.”
What feeds Corporal So-and-So's relentless yammering all the way to the end of this road is the dread of contagion. Our television screens flicker nightly with images of death in a steamy jungle. Walter Cronkite delivers Cementville its first shot in the national spotlight.
Soon the convoy will pass under the tattered banner at the town's northern mouth welcoming the rare visitor.
CEMENTVILLE
, the banner reads,
Solid through the Hard Times
. Someone long ago thought the pun clever and strung it between two stone bluffs on
galvanized aircraft cable, all that remained from the soured dream of an airport. Our valley stretches between knotted parallels of knobs, making a fecund lap in which rest tracts suitable for pasturing or rose gardens, for webbing with snug lanes bordered by dry stone walls cobbled nearly two centuries ago from cleared bottomland. We are little more than a handful of stores and a clutch of sound old houses, protection from the storms that howl across the floodplain as if fighting the grip of the river.
Our town's reputation had been built upon the production of two things: passable cement and remarkable whiskey. And now it will be remembered by this new catastrophe. Along with a profusion of wreaths and baskets of lilies, out-of-town relatives have been sending clippings from the national papers, articles that wonder at war's appetite for plucking up farm boys and returning them home in wooden boxes.
Tiny Cementville, people all over the country are saying, population a thousand and three, suffering a loss out of all proportion to its size. Seven local boys, gone all at once in one horrific night. Boys whose parents thought they were safe, having signed on with the National Guard to protect the homeland. Not to be shipped out to some faraway place we never heard of.