Fender serial number dating serviceDickinson gave a lightless smile and waved another paper at Ramsey, then nodded to one of the dragoons.“Can you ask the colonel to join us?” Slyly, he would put down advance payments on any object that he was passionate about and which he wanted to prevent me buying. His motor car was packed with suitcases, canvases, Capodimonte porcelain, oranges, eighteenth-century Italian illustrated books and miniature cribs. But it’s also true that I don’t belong here, though I’ve had a bed to snuggle into and a quilt to spread over me. I belong in the other country, the one I do not know. Duncan stood and reached for the boy, shaking him by the shoulders.“You mean an Englishman? A soldier?” “What,” asked Fiala, “is it that she has agreed to do?” Didn’t the fellow check how damned windy it gets up here before he went and built his rest home? Here it just blows and blows. When Dad was a kid the church blew away. One morning people woke to find nothing but debris strewn around the property. Pieces of the organ were scattered all over the hayfield. It was a gold mine for the children and provided raw material for all sorts of workmanship for a few years afterward, especially the pipes. Some had been blown up into the hills. Half the instrument was stuck in the stream, and the keyboard lay on the bank, split in two yet hanging together. Like half a rib cage from an unknown creature that maybe went to get a drink a hundred years ago but then, like Lati Geir in the poem, lay there lazily until it died. Sheet music with hymns and funeral marches was cast across the slopes, while on the grave of Great-grandpa and Great-grandma lay an openhymnal, as if someone had placed it there neatly. “He said, ‘You think if I get enough of these nice ones, Dad’ll come back and teach me how to play?’” The man was standing not far from the domed building, tall and slim and very dark, in light-colored clothing, a camera around his neck. I was on my way to Dock Wood on the warm day about which the stories were spun. I’d planned to go straight over the plank bridging the little ditch, but I had a feeling that the man with the camera wanted to talk to me, so I walked toward him. Then he came over to me and smiled a radiant, sad smile that’s haunted me ever since. “Hi, I’m calling about Theon Pinkney. This is his wife.” I won’t go any farther with you unless you take it. Added to the sky is the contrail of a jet that I wish I were in, no matter where it’s going — the only passenger, free from my daughter, my mother, free from the earth upon which I’m stuck. the good things she did “The king’s officers were blinded to the right of it.” Ross abruptly pushed back his chair and stood. “When free men have the truth of something, that is all the authority they need.” He pointed to a paper pinned to the wall by the hearth. “At least the English did that one thing right.” Although I’d lied about my boss at theTribune sending me to the rally, I did bring a notepad, and more or less pretended to be a reporter. I asked some of the protesters why, exactly, they were out today. Every response was a variation on some vague patriot-babble:“Because I’m an American, and that’s what we Americans do,” or, “I just want to be out here to show support.” When I followed up by asking what it was, specifically, they were supporting, my interviewees responded with some version of, “I’m supporting freedom and democracy,” and the question returned to why that support was necessary today, and I found myself in an endless feedback loop of nationalistic vapidity. I kept checking the homemade signs, hoping to find a clear cause, but the signs were just as nebulous as the people who’d made them. That document possessed a distinct magnetic pull. It had its own field of gravity. The fact that it is presently being passed around the room in silence corroborates that it is no ordinary piece of paper. Exhibit A, you will find, is a remittance advice, a salary slip. The staggering figure of€100,000 is printed in thePayablebox. And the staggering name in thePayee box is mine. “It just all came together,” I said. “The sounds and light, the pain inside me. It just all came together and I was coming harder than I ever had — ever.” I frowned out at the ragged hedgerows with their mud-spattered leaves.‘How much did we pay for this again?’ but Hickey couldn’t remember either. We were searching for a rusty green gate. That’s what the directions said, scrawled in his potato-print hand on the back of the site map.M1, fourth exit, left, rusty green gate. The map itself didn’t extend to encompass the motorway. There was no reference point from which to navigate. A crazy-paving pattern of local boundaries, but noX marks the spot to reveal the chest of gold. If this was what they had managed to sell us in our own backyard, God knows what we had purchased around the globe in our delirium. I went to toss the useless page into the back seat but there was no back seat in the truck. I sat with the map on my lap. “Khedive,” Sponer ordered. The others were unfamiliar to him.. |