Table of Contents Views and Mechanics Publisher's Note Editor's Note Review of A Man Without a Country Review of Gail's Place Review of Three 1-Act Plays Review of Yesterday's A Dream Crossword (Solution Posted in May. Printable version in pdf format of journal.) Jan/Feb Crossword Solution Creative Nonfiction Imagining Nora By Lisa Norris Loving the Fat Girl By Christina Fisanick Nate's Fish and Poultry Shop By G. David Schwartz The Folly of Valentine's Day By Andy Martello Poetry Hawk King By Wanda D. Campbell After the Rain By Wanda D. Campbell You Cannot Fold the Flood. By Mariela Perez-Simons And Darkness Fell By Beth L. Block Demise of a Family Resort By Carolyn Howard-Johnson The Asparagus Cutters By Joe Wilkins Fiction Voices By Ed Boyd Little White Sambo By Brett Alan Sanders Dies Irae By Timothy Reilly Follow By Dawn Paul Crumbs By Kim Tremblett Cover Art Photography by Seth Brown About the Contributors © 2006, River Walk Journal and respective authors and artists. All rights reserved. Do not use or reproduce without permission. River Walk Journal, Inc. Board of Directors Chairman - Elizabeth Ross Vice Chairman - Joseph Koch Secretary/Treasurer - Geri Stock-Ross Editorial Director - Patti Kurtz, DA Literacy Director - Bill Mausteller Policy Director - PA State Rep. Jess Stairs Advisory Board Chairman - Patti Kurtz, DA Asst. Chairman - Dan Lachenman, PhD Samuel Hazo Christopher Leland Edwin Yoder Joseph Bathanti Journal Staff Publisher - Elizabeth Ross Editor-In-Chief - Joseph Koch Sen. Fiction Editor - Patti Kurtz Sen. Poetry Editor - Neeldhara Misra Sen. Creative Nonfiction Editor - Brenda Coxe Contributing Editor - Robert Dittman Publicity Director (PA) - Geri Stock-Ross For information about submissions, visit http://www.riverwalkjournal.org/submission.html. Questions about promotions, subscribers' services, and advertising should be sent to publisher@riverwalkjournal.org. River Walk Journal, Inc. is a non-profit corporation run entirely by volunteers. For information about volunteer opportunities and internships, visit http://www.riverwalkjournal.org/volunteer.html.

Imagining Nora By Lisa Norris She was a woman of thirty, in a place so raw that armed men drove rightful owners from their property, opposed only by vigilantes led by the local postmaster. It could not have been a safe place for a woman by herself, but having grown up with four brothers, three of whom were probably alcoholics, maybe Nora had learned what it took to take care of herself: for instance, run far far away when there was trouble. Was that a genetic predisposition? For I was as far from my Virginia home now as my great-great aunt Nora had been from her Pennsylvania farm in 1889. Granted, I'd had to travel from Virginia to deliver my son to his father, my ex-husband, in Idaho for the usual summer visit. But instead of high tailing it home, I wandered like Cain, paying not for the sin of murder but for moving my son far from his biological father after my marriage dissolved. Oh, the decision could be justified: I had moved to rejoin my parents and siblings while I went to graduate school, intending afterwards to find work in the West. But soon enough, I met the man who would become my second husband. Ten years later, I was still living in Virginia, keeping my son far from his father and myself estranged from a landscape I loved. Often enough, looking at the sharp ridges of the immense Western mountains, remembering the clear high lakes and vivid wildflowers, the trails I'd walked through forests where I hadn't seen another hiker, I felt pretty sad. Even while I was in it, I missed the landscape as one might miss a lover. I couldn't imagine why I had left it behind. I’d felt desperate, I guess, as a new mother who suddenly found herself alone with an infant over 2,000 miles from her biological connections. Indeed, I had run home to Mama and the rest of the tribe. Nora, on the other hand, had left her son with the tribe and run toward the wilderness. What were her motives? If I knew them, I might know mine. Was she a brave adventuress, a feminist heroine, or a self-centered woman whose maternal instincts had gone awry? It was August in Montana. Castle Creek, only a few feet across and shallow meandered through a narrow valley in what had once been a silver mining town. A prairie dog showed itself in the rubble of a ruined foundation. Standing on its dirt mound between the collapsing buildings, it twitched its tail, split the air with a high squeak that sounded like mocking laughter, then disappeared. Humans were gone, prairie dogs remained, and I looked pretty silly with my notebook out as if to record something of importance. I’d traveled to Castle Town to imagine the way it might have looked to Nora Norris in 1889, but of course all I could do, as usual, was make things up. I knew that fifteen hundred people had inhabited what was now an overgrown hillside, but whom they’d been and how they’d felt about things was information that was pretty much lost. The heads of Prairie dogus mockeronious, on the other hand, popped up from holes in the ground as if to gloat that they had adapted and survived where humans had come and gone. Ha! Ha ha! Maybe there had been enough human traffic to quiet them Way Back When great-great Aunt Nora arrived. Perhaps as she stepped down from the stagecoach, she smelled wood smoke and admired the new houses, no holes yet in the roofs. Windows not broken out but solidly glassed. Prairie dogs chased away by dogs and shotguns. The stink of outhouses, of livestock in the yards, might have made her grimace, and piles of horse dung probably steamed in the streets, but probably she was cheered by the sight of customers going into the general store or stopping by the post office: signs of commerce, prosperity, hope for a long and lucrative future. She couldn’t yet know that in just a few years, Castle would be deserted. Let’s say she gathered up her skirts, exchanged polite greetings with the cowboy helping her down from the stagecoach and felt Disappointment? Fear? Release? Was she the kind of woman to look back and thousand miles of space years old, left behind with his grandmother. Did her temporary freedom from domestic responsibilities make her feel wonderfully independent and unencumbered, or bereft? Castle's ruins didn't give me the answer, so I drove. The road snaked gently along the South Fork of the Musselshell River, prairie to one side, Castle Mountains to the other. Dried grasses colored the hills yellow except for the blue-green leaves of sagebrush and the dark green pines in the draws. I followed signs to the Charles M. Bair Family Museum, where I hoped to find some illuminating footnote to Nora’s history. Inside the gift shop, I had to adjust to the dim light, a relief after the intensity of the sun outside. I lingered in the air conditioning, skimming through the exhibits about Bair's Gold Rush experiences, his daughters, the artifacts and antiques they'd brought back with them from Europe, and his sheep ranching successes. I spun the post card rack, selecting a few, and browsed through the books on the shelf. I found the restroom impeccably clean and enjoyed a cold drink of water from the fountain. But it was nearly closing time. The woman behind the counter shifted uneasily. She wore jeans and a T-shirt, her brown hair in a ponytail. Her skin was prairie brown, light wrinkles around her eyes like cracks in the earth. "What brought you to this part of the country?" I asked her, laying my postcards on the counter like an offering. “Work.” The word exploded from her mouth like a bullet. On her face was an expression of impatience, as though I were not the only customer in the place but one of many, all asking the same irritating question. “Oh, you just came out to work at the museum?” “No. My husband got a job out here on a ranch.” She looked out the window, across the parking lot, toward the treeless prairie, as if she, too, would rather be outside. "Well it’s a long way to anywhere from here, isn’t it?" She glared, then punched the buttons on the cash register. “If you want to go to Bozeman from Great Falls, you’ve got to go right through here” she said, as if we’d been arguing. “We’re right in the middle of everything.” Nora, too, must have felt in the middle of everything, since Montana was then in an economic upturn: it had just become a state; in 1887, it was the biggest supplier of silver in the nation, and the Empire Builder Railroad had been completed from the Great Lakes to Butte, Montana, the year Nora arrived. Her son, her mother and siblings were far away, but here she could make a good living; she could send money home. In my present in-between state, feeling almost as phantom-like as Nora herself traveling in a place where I had no friends or relations, I envied Nora that sense of purpose. * * * * * * At the two-pump Martinsdale gas station a couple of miles from the museum, a white-haired man handled the service. A few cars were parked by the Mint Bar. The only other establishment in sight was the Stockman’s Bank, no longer in operation. The gas station attendant was the only person visible in the quiet town: the mood was Hitchcockian, everything vivid in the intensity of evening metal of the parked cars. Though it was nearly 5 p.m., the sun still baked the prairie. I rolled both windows down, and my dog, a nondescript Aussie mix named Roxy, a dog once abandoned by the side of a road, panted heavily. “Your friend getting hot?” the attendant asked, doing his best to make conversation, but it wasn’t enough to break the feeling of isolation that was still upon me as I made my solitary way down the empty highway between Martinsdale and Harlowton. What was I doing, wandering alone in pursuit of a ghost? Why wasn't I with friends or family--or at least in a town populated by other human beings? All right, some of my isolation was circumstantial, a consequence of my desire to remain within a day's drive of my son while he was with his father. Such a decision kept me far from my Virginia relations, but I could have stayed with friends in Idaho or Oregon. What seemed more important was an opportunity to which I rarely had access in my usual life as a mother, teacher and wife: the freedom to do whatever the hell I wanted, whether it meant driving 100 miles through an empty prairie, lazing by a river, or spending the day in the Charles M. Bair museum in the middle of Nowheresville, Montana. I was lonely, yes. But I was free: as I drove down the highway, the landscape felt blessedly empty. Light glinted from irrigation wheels, making the wheat fields glow, though behind them the sky was dark. Green hills rose toward the wheat. Deer watched me from a pasture. Three cranes in the middle of a hayfield lifted their heads, white feathers gleaming, long legs like shadowy sticks. In the distance, a spectacular bolt of lightning struck the prairie. The sheep grazing on the hillside didn’t flinch. Their wool was the color of rock. A few miles further, a small herd of antelope gathered in a weedy field. My truck followed the steep incline of a hill, my stomach thrilling as it did on a rollercoaster. But as it dropped down on the other side, and Harlowton came into view, my mood sank with the decreasing elevation. I felt myself excluded by the sight of its houses--the cut lawns, the cared-for gardens, all the signs of belonging that I'd rejected, at least for a time, in favor of the open highway. If I continued to follow the lure of all that is possible when one is alone, I would eventually, in fact, have no choice but to live alone, and that wasn't all I longed for. * * * * * * Just one year after her arrival in Castle, Nora moved to the Rosedale school in the Paradise Valley, a far more spectacular location than Castle, between Livingston and Yellowstone Park, where the Yellowstone River makes its glittering way through the Absaroka Mountains. Paradise Valley is now dotted with the expansive glass-and-wood homes of wealthy Californians, though the occasional grizzly still lumbers through. In Nora's day, of course, one was far more likely to see the bear than the Californian. I like to think Nora knew Castle Town was doomed: she missed its rapid demise, when silver prices fell, by three years; also in Paradise Valley, she met and married her second husband and began to put down the roots that would nourish her for some 50 years. I wanted roots, too, but I wanted them where I didn't yet have them--here, where the landscape felt like a temple, not in Virginia, where the highway I traveled most frequently, Interstate 81, was a deathtrap of speeding semis. What I didn’t know was whether living in such a temple would become as ordinary as living anywhere else. Would it make up for the loss of easy access to the people I loved? Could I find out by imagining Nora? I wandered through Livingston’s Park County Museum, trying to find evidence of Nora’s life among artifacts from the past century: a stagecoach, a beaver skin coat, a water pitcher and basin, a hand-cranked sewing machine, china dolls, wooden skis, packsaddles, a wooden ox yoke. Finally, in the small museum where I was the only customer, I came across a room where dust built on the tops of old school desks. An 1898 teacher’s certificate read: “This certifies that the bearer hererof . . . known as a person of good moral character and having passed a satisfactory exam . . . is authorized to teach in the public schools .” Nora would have had one like that. A volume about the history of the local schools reported Nora’s salary and marriage: “In 1890 Miss Norris taught for $45 per month at the Rosedale School and afterward became Mrs. Sohl.” Jacob Sohl, a bridge builder and contractor who had been elected trustee of the school, had put a new roof on the schoolhouse. Perhaps that was their opportunity for courtship bachelor stopping in for a glass of water after he’d pounded a few nails. In 1893, they were married, a circumstance that prevented Nora from continuing her job: married women weren’t allowed to be schoolteachers. Still, however, she apparently had to make a living wage. The year her son died, 1904, the Livingston City Directory lists her occupation as cook. By 1912, age 52, she and Mary Brown are listed as proprietresses of the Montana Café at 110 S. Main, where “Our Meals and Service Unexcelled. Milk, Cream and Produce from Our Own Ranch.” In 1914, Nora’s name is bold-faced, while Jacob’s appears in a smaller font, with no occupation listed. Family stories suggest they had a contentious marriage, with money as the primary source of conflict. Yet Nora was able to send cash back to her brothers in Pennsylvania. From 1912, the address listed for Nora and Jacob is 331 S. 5th, where they remained until they died. That location would have been within a few blocks of the restaurant Nora ran and only one block over from Yellowstone Street, district of the richest and most powerful. “B” Street, also within walking distance, though seven or eight blocks away, included ten houses with a madam and one or two girls in each. The red light district remained active until 1948, several years after Nora’s death. No doubt her first years in the Livingston area, from 1890 into the early twentieth century, were the most, shall we say, interesting. The last cowboy shootout occurred in 1902, in the Bucket of Blood Saloon just down the street from the place where later, Nora would have her café. During those early years, too, Calamity Jane was bounced from the local Longbranch Saloon by “Madame Bulldog,” a 200 pound woman who did her job, according to the Livingston Enterprise, “better than a plug ugly man.” Drifters involved with railroad construction created a dangerous atmosphere. Children routinely carried guns to school until 1912. By 1913, however, there was a 40-room hospital second to none in Montana. In 1914 there were five theaters. Nora’s obituary identifies her as a long standing member of the First Methodist Church congregation: living in a town full of sinners didn’t mean one had to participate in the debauchery. But in the midst of the chaos, the new town burgeoning forth on the frontier, mud and dust churned up by wagon wheels on the streets, robberies of the stagecoach not uncommon, Civil and Indian wars not far in the past, and always nature dealing out people's fortunes - cattle fattening when there was rain, dying of starvation when there was none; crickets swarming over the crops; blizzards making even the short path to the outhouse treacherous - in despite all of this, by herself from ages 30-35, Nora managed to make it all on her own, from Castle to Rosedale and finally to a partnership with Jacob and a homeplace at 331 S. 5th Street. I was proud of her. * * * * * * Between Martinsdale and Harlowtown, the Crazy Mountains rose to the south. The road careened, and I rode the descent into the brown treeless plain, where a small sign sported an arrow that pointed down a gravel road. It was the kind of road my husband Ed, a dedicated Easterner, would say led to nowhere, but the sign read: “Two Dot Bar. Easy to Find, Hard to Leave.” I was sorely tempted to turn off the highway for a beer, but the advertisement made the place sound a little too much like the Twilight Zone, or the past, or was it just the illusion of the past that kept me from fully engaging in the present, buffeting me about between one life and the other as if by the high prairie wind? If Nora’s life were admirable, her refusal to accept the sad, narrow lot of a divorced single mother in a small Pennsylvania town an act of bravery; if Nora remade herself in the wild new West despite what must have been extraordinary difficulties, not the least of which would have been perfectly well grounded fears; if she did, in fact, come to love the landscape, as well as her new, Bavarian husband; if she raised her son as best she could once he came West--an age not recorded--and if the Livingston Enterprise version of him is to be believed< “he was a bright, companionable young man, and his early death is sincerely mourned by all who knew him”-- then surely she would have been devastated when he died at the age of 21. I imagine her like a sturdy character from a Willa Cather novel, arms deep in bread dough, transforming her sorrow into something useful and good in her café under the shadow of the grizzly-thick mountains. But what if Nora were a coward? What if she ran from a perfectly good husband and son simply because she was restless or selfish? Maybe she was so focused on money that she was lured to Montana by the promise of wealth in the up and coming silver mining town? Quickly, perhaps, she understood the limitations of that promise. Maybe she married Jacob because he had land. Maybe she understood the real wealth was not in mining but in feeding the miners or railroad men the better-loved offspring. Maybe he really did, as one of my aunts believes, murder his uncle in California. Maybe that, too, was for money, greed a lesson well learned. Was Nora a criminal or a victim? A canny risk-taker or a woman who, rabbit-like, simply reacted by fleeing headlong into the bush? My version of the story mattered. I was shaping a mythology for myself, looking to Nora - the only divorced/remarried woman and mother in the family other than myself - for a way to fashion my own life. Did she love this landscape, as I did, or did she miss the deciduous forests of the East? Did she settle for a life in a place where she never felt at home, or did she risk everything - including her son - to fulfill a dream the West provided? At the age of thirty, she parked her son with her mother and headed out. That still left a woman shackled by family responsibilities, of course grandmother given him birth. On the other hand, the boy might have grown up understanding that a woman could, in fact, value herself for her own abilities, and make a decent living. It could have meant that as an adult, he wouldn’t expect his life partner to twist herself into a pretzel trying to accommodate him. Too bad he died too young for anyone to find out. In another version of the story, of course, I imagine his early death as her punishment. She abandoned him at age six; she failed to be present as a parent. We might read the cause of his death, “rheumatism of the heart,” as a broken heart, the longing he felt for his mother never fully satisfied. I imagine him on that bridge construction gang near Missoula during his final hours, pounding away with his hammer under the intense summer sun, a hunched figure in cowboy hat and shirt sleeves, feeling an ache in his chest so like the ache of that sadness he’d felt since his mother left that he didn’t realize it meant impending death. Finally, though, the version of Nora’s life I want to accept is the one I that enables me to forgive myself: Nora made the decision to come West, as I did when I moved East, because it gave her a way to make a living and to forge a new life as she resumed the name I, too, had reclaimed after my divorce: the name of our fathers, men who had left their European homes to travel to a land as full of heartbreak and promise as Montana must have been for Miss Nora Norris. * * * * * From the cool of the shade trees whose shadows lengthened in the quiet afternoon, across the lawn and over the headstones, the 10,000 foot-plus peaks of the Absaroka-Beartooth Wilderness formed a gateway to Yellowstone National Park. A breeze pattered through the cottonwood leaves, no other sound or movement in this resting place under the Big Sky. I had driven to the outer edge of the cemetery where the view of the mountains was best, walked tentatively among the gravestones, looking for her name, then returned to the rental car to study the map of the cemetery. I’d marked her plot with an X, trying to find her. But the map was outdated: many more graves had been added since Nora was buried here in 1943. When I heard the sound of heavy machinery from the direction of the graveyard office, I drove slowly around the rows of graves, gravel crunching beneath the tires. A big broad-shouldered woman in jeans and a Tweety Bird T-shirt had just driven the bulldozer into the office parking lot. She had dark heavy eyebrows. I guessed she was fortyish, my age. She looked as if she were built for this rough country, broad-shouldered and big-boned, with large, capable-looking hands, stepping down from the bulldozer seat in a mannish way. She wore her brown hair straight to her shoulders. Dark-framed glasses formed large circles around her eyes. “What can I do for you?” she asked. “I’m looking for a grave.” In the office she pulled out an updated map and matched the plot number I’d found at the library with her information. “Oh sure, I know where that is. Just follow me.” As we walked among the gravestones, she shook her head at the grass. “The Livingston ditch had a moss problem, so we haven’t had water all summer.” “It is awful dry here.” I carried chapstick in my pocket to keep my lips from turning to sandpaper, and in the shadeless town, when I’d opened the door of my parked car, it had been like opening the door of a blast furnace. We walked toward the heart of the cemetery, the two of us moving deeper into a maze of headstones. Finally she pointed to a monument. “Well it’s leaning a little, but there’s her son.” “Thomas Crawford. Woodmen of the World. 1883-1904,” I read from the monument. “Only 21 years old." The top of the tall, pyramid-shaped marker was level with my head. Next to it a knee-high stone marked the grave of his stepfather, Jacob Sohl, 1859-1941. Flat with the ground was the humblest marker, the one I most sought: Nora Norris Sohl, 1859-1943. “She outlived her son by 41 years,” I said. “And her husband by two. In the end, there was only a sister who came from California to attend her.” I studied the dates on her tombstone. What would it be like to die in the middle of a world war, not knowing what might happen to your country? My guide was silent. Then she nodded, turned, and melted back into the maze of headstones. I breathed in the quiet under the cottonwood trees. The wind fluttered their leaves, and it was a soothing sound in the otherwise still afternoon. I liked it that at least in death, Nora, Joe and Thomas were gathered in a beautiful place with a view of the Absarokas. I wondered if, in fact, I’d been moved from place to place not by my own questions but by a spirit, Nora’s spirit, who wanted a descendant to witness her life. Obedient to this spirit, I photographed the gravestones so I could show them to other members of the family, adding more witnesses to the list. What if, in fact, we were one big organism, this family of Norrises, let’s say one with a thousand tentacles, and Nora’s had been the arm that reached into Montana? Was it enough for me that one of us had made a life in Montana? Or did I have to do it as well? * * * * * * * A Zen-minded friend has told me more than once that all I have to do is “Just notice.” When I’m tempted to do something more definite, such as move to Montana, because I feel that ache of longing for the West, she says “noticing” can be action enough. Driving East from Livingston toward Virginia, I noticed I was sad. I noticed I was uncertain. I noticed I wanted something I seemed to have lost illusions, particularly those connected to the nuclear family? Or had I always felt this way? Was my restlessness simply a biochemical predisposition I had somehow attached to open spaces and Rocky Mountains? In a way the longing felt good, like listening to Nina Simone’s sad, beautiful music or John Coltrane playing a mournful melody. Through Nora, I inhabited such feelings without having to experience the banality of daily life in a real place weeds in the garden. Was my pursuit of Nora, then, merely a recreational pursuit, such as attending a good concert or seeing an interesting film? Or was the urge to know her life deeper than the desire for temporary catharsis? As the land flattened into the Midwestern cornfields and the road took me closer to my Virginia home, the density of vehicles increased on the highways. Eventually, as I crossed into South Dakota, then Iowa, the atmosphere thickened, and the white haze of humidity obscured the blue sky. Bugs chirred noisily from the thick deciduous forests, and the quiet of Castle, Montana, pierced only by the prairie dog’s cry, became a more distant memory. I thought of the three white cranes lifting from the Montana prairie as if they’d been in a slow, beautifully choreographed performance on a vast open stage. Nora would have seen such things; she would also have visited the graves of her husband and son, lifting her eyes to the tops of the Absaroka Mountains from beneath the cottonwood trees. I felt connected to her through time and these landscapes, yet also I imagined her shooing me away as she might have done to the schoolchildren she taught or the café customers at closing time, saying, “Go on now. There’s not that much time. Make your own life.”