Table of Contents Views and Mechanics Publisher's Note Editor's Note Review of Lions at Lamb House Review of Jamestown Review of The Children of Húrin Review of The Politics of Life Film Review of "300" Creative Nonfiction Home By Marion Agnew One Foot and Then the Other By Greg Coykendall Poetry Hannah Plays with Light By Kristine Ong Muslim Caricature of an Early Planter By Michael Lee Johnson Comes a Push-Cart Down a Long-Ass Ghazal By Levon DeBranch Modern Day Moses By Bob Boston Squares (2) Plaza De Armas, Santiago, Chile By Graham Burchell Fiction The Larchmont Campaign By Zain Deane Body Warmth By Louise Kantro The Good People Up North By T.M. Spooner Triple Word Score By Patricia C. Meringer Texans Abroad By Franklin Strong Hunting for Manhood By Jason Sizemore Staten Island Zen By Michael Enright About the Contributors © 2007, 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 - Kenneth Weiss, Ed.D 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 Senior Editor - Patti Kurtz Senior Editor - Neeldhara Misra Copyeditor - Kathy Skaggs Blog Contributing Editor - Maggie Koster Education Blog Contributing Editor - Jordan Wirfs-Brock Publicity Director (PA) - Geri Stock-Ross For information about submissions, visit http://www.riverwalkjournal.org/subs.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 VolunteerMatch.

Home By Marion Agnew I look for my mother at the lake every August. I slip away from visiting family to walk the narrow, stony road that her father, my grandfather, carved through the woods in the 1930s. Thirty feet above my head, birch leaves whisper. A gull soars by, keening; a crow spits a mocking challenge. Light and shadows, rustlings and silences wrap me in a soft blanket. This land, with its two small cottages on the Lake Superior shoreline, was her home. My mother learned to swim in the shallow bay. She picked blueberries at the top of the cliff that rises, black and solid, from the rocks at the shoreline. She watched thousands of sunrises shoot golden fire across the water. She died in the summer of 2000, yet I look for her as I walk the woods. I look for her as I sit in the sunrise on the beach, as I row in the bay. I look for her in long midsummer twilights, when the half-cup moon spills a silver path across the water to my feet. I listen for her in the whispering birches and the murmuring waves. I look for her in the rocks, in the water, in the breeze. ** My mother was born Jeanne LeCaine. She left Port Arthur, Ontario, for Queen’s University in the 1930s. She never returned to northwestern Ontario to live full-time, yet she never really left. She wrote the dissertation for her Ph.D. in mathematics at a makeshift desk in the woodshed behind the small cottage. After World War II, now married and Jeanne Agnew, she and my father found teaching positions in Oklahoma. She taught in Oklahoma for 60 years. But nothing could sever her connection to this land, this place. She returned to the lake every summer. August in Oklahoma is severe: acres of shimmering, semi-liquid asphalt reflect thick heat. After every summer term, she packed five kids, a pet or two, and my father into a station wagon and headed north for a few weeks. Like a salmon, she returned every summer to the physical place of her beginning – except that instead of spawning new offspring, she herself was reborn. Mom wasn’t exactly a different person at the cottage. She was just happier. In Oklahoma, she ran a disciplined, orderly household. Five children and an active academic career required efficiency. In Oklahoma, I didn’t relish her undivided attention. Her help with my homework, fractions and percents and long division, invariably reduced me to tears and her to impatience. Life at the lake, though still structured, was more relaxed. As in Oklahoma, we did plenty of chores. Properly supervised, we took turns cooking. My brothers sawed and split logs for the stove and the fireplace. My older sister and I helped my mother wash and dry dishes, beat the rugs, and sweep out the sand tracked inside each day. My father’s primary responsibility, emptying pails from the outhouse, won him a reprieve from other tasks. Besides, he wasn’t an outdoors person. A historian and scholar, not a woodsman, he didn’t fix things. He didn’t own blue jeans or work boots, didn’t use levels and screwdrivers. His tool of choice was a ballpoint pen, applied to paper, driven by his intellect. So he read, scratching notes in margins, or wrote. At the lake, as in Oklahoma, he often preferred to be left alone. It was, after all, his vacation. And it was our vacation, too. After chores, all of us played, including Mom. One summer when I was 7 or so, she and I cobbled together a raft from pulp logs that had escaped the lumber companies’ booms to wash up on the beach. Two of my brothers, knee-deep in the frigid water, dragged volleyball-sized rocks into a large pile to serve as a makeshift wharf. My oldest brother spread caulk on all the joints of the old wooden rowboat left over from my grandfather’s day, while my sister sketched him. As Mom and I worked, laying scrap wood across two logs and hammering nails, she told me that the rafts she had made as a child never lasted through the winter. Brushing the silver hair back from her forehead, she watched me pound a nail. The sun warmed our swim-suited bodies, and the morning smelled fresh and new. “My brother, your Uncle Hugh, was much better at it,” she said. “He would put four or five or even six logs together and make a huge raft that he could stand up on. Here, lay this one across here. No, like this. See? Okay, nail it. He could pole them across the bay.” “Like the boys last year,” I said, wiping my sweaty palms on my swimsuit and picking up the hammer again. A large raft had turned up on our beach the previous summer. My brothers, five years and more older than I, poled it around the point, where the water was ten feet deep. It was too dangerous for me to manage, Mom had said. I was too little, not strong or sure enough. I still wasn’t strong enough, not to hammer well anyway. I was trying, but I must have hit a knot. That nail wasn’t going in any farther. “Yes, like the boys last year. I wonder what happened to that raft over the winter.” Mom paused to look out at the water, then shook her head. “Well, as my mother used to say, ‘What the lake giveth, the lake taketh away.’ Yes, Hugh’s rafts were big like that.” I pounded away. A little impatience crept into her voice. “Here, let me.” She took the hammer, and I held the board in place. Meanwhile, I peeked up at her, trying to see the little girl in her lined forehead and graying hair. She added, “He always had an extra box on them, ‘for provisions,’ he used to say.” “What’s ‘provisions’?” I asked, watching her pound fruitlessly at the nail. “What my mother called ‘eats.’ Food,” she answered absently. “Well, bleah.” She gave up and drove the shaft of the nail down sideways so it wouldn’t stick up and hurt my feet. I looked at her, eyebrows raised. “Grandma let you take food out on the raft?” “Oh, no,” she said. She tugged on the board to see if it would hold, then handed me another nail. “Here, put it in about there. No, we never had extra food, and besides, we weren’t really going anywhere, so we made do with pretend provisions.” She stood up and smiled at our handiwork: two logs, about six inches apart, crossed near one end by three long boards that stuck out like airplane wings. A shorter board, nailed crosswise like the others about halfway back, provided some stability. A masterpiece. Mom helped me shove the raft the remaining foot or two into the water, and I straddled one of the logs, gasping at the cold-water shock as I sat. I pushed along the lake bottom with my feet until the raft and I were completely free and floating. She watched me for a moment before calling, “Don’t go out too far.” “I won’t,” I answered. I wanted to get out ten yards or so, where the bottom turned to sand. As I kicked and paddled, inching toward my goal, I looked around the small bay. Like the boys, Uncle Hugh had poled rafts past these same black rocks. Meanwhile, like me, my mother had paddled around in the safety of the bay on a smaller raft. Like me. ** In August of 2000, three months after my mother died, family congregated at the lake as usual: my sister and her husband, my husband and I, my mother’s sister, and my father. One morning of our vacation, I scraped at the worn, flaking paint on ancient boards of our smaller cottage, attacking the sickly, too-green yellow with glee. The cottage had looked jaundiced for years. I had selected a warm, brave gold, the color of the birch leaves in September, to restore the cottage to at least the appearance of health. The sun rested warmly on my neck. As I gouged away, tiny flecks of paint showered around me, sticking to my shoulders and hair. Sweat trickled down my backbone, spreading at the waistband of my shorts. The few balsams between the cottage and the lake deflected any breeze from the water. “Can I help?” Allison, my aunt, asked from inside the cottage. Her white blouse was clean in the dim coolness behind the screen. I thought of her arthritic shoulders, her careful, even steps, her 75 years. “No, but thanks,” I said, as I knew she hoped I would. I rested my scraper against the wood and wiped my forehead with the back of my hand. “Hot work,” I said. “But worthy,” she answered. “It’s good to see you taking care of the place.” I smiled. It felt good to me, too. When we visited the lake as adults, my mother organized work crews – the price, she said, of vacation. She, not my father, painted the front of the cottage this so-wrong color. But, I told myself, the wan paint was a temporary aberration in the long history of the cottage. So were the years of my mother’s illness. She was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease in 1997, many years after we, and she, knew something was wrong. In the face of the illness itself, the diagnosis seemed almost incidental. The disease took her vocabulary and her self-command. But, I reminded myself, those years of her illness were just an aberration, just part of her long life. Still, that vague invalid was the mother I remembered most clearly. I needed to find the woman she had been. So much I had not been able to control – her illness, her death, the grief. But at least I could fix the color of the cottage. I shifted the scraper in my hand, ready to begin again. The reflection in the window next to Allison caught my eye. In the old glass, the islands in the bay rippled green and brown against the blue sky and water. I turned to look at them directly. Caribou, the larger island, performed its magic trick, hovering above the surface of the silver-blue water as if unconnected to this world. Just three miles away. But I had never actually touched the island, never set foot on it. That summer, the first without my mother, I was restless. Watching Caribou wink at me across the water, I thought, What’s there? What could I see? As if on cue, our aluminum rowboat glided smoothly around the point into our small bay. I caught my breath. My husband and brother-in-law had rented a small motor. It was a calm day, safe enough for a three-mile trip. We could really go to Caribou. ** In early 1998, as Mom’s disease moved into its middle stage, she began wandering – a common Alzheimer’s symptom with a strikingly inaccurate name. Someone wandering meanders, drifts aimlessly from here to there. A “wandering” Alzheimer’s patient walks with purpose. Usually, that purpose is related to home: going home, where someone waits, someone worries about me, I need to get there, let me go home. In the spring, Mom’s wandering increased. At least once a week, she slipped out of the house when Dad was inattentive for even a moment. Friends would see her five miles away and bring her home. I recognized her route, through the university campus to the highway leading toward I-35, as the beginning of our summer trip. The interstate would take her north to Duluth; Highway 61 led to the Canadian border, Thunder Bay, and her home 15 miles beyond. To the cottages at the lake. In other families, coping with illness may be less daunting than it was in ours. Mom’s illness challenged our family’s inertia, our unwillingness to believe she was failing. Other families may respond better to the “Can’t you just…” questions. Can’t you just move your parents here? Can’t you just move there? Can’t you just find a residence for her there? No, no, and no, not at that time. Solutions are easy to offer to other people’s parents. That spring, Dad and I talked on the phone every week. I squeezed my eyes tight as I listened to his historian’s detailed description of their routine. Mom’s wandering and belligerence pushed at his limits. She could not be alone, and neither could he. She was demanding, he was frustrated, and I couldn’t help. For one thing, uprooting my life to be closer was impossible; my marriage, already not strong, would not survive. For another, even if I moved in with them, what could I do? From 800 miles away, I focused on her need to go home. That spring, I resolved that Mom would go to the lake as usual that summer. Obviously, I thought, she would be happy there. As I talked with my sister about the trip, I would say, “Of course, being there won’t make her well.” But inside me, a small voice whispered, Anything can happen. You never know. I opened the cottages in early July. Our handyman did the heavy work of removing shutters and setting up the water lines. I worked inside, sweeping out squirrel and mouse nests, stocking the refrigerator, and freezing a few meals for Dad to reheat after I left. I opened the windows and trimmed the branches to let in light and air. Mom and Dad arrived in time for a late supper. We sat at a table overlooking the lake. My father reported, “So after our Memphis leg, we had three hours in Minneapolis, and we decided to get something to eat.” He speared green beans on his fork and chewed them slowly. Mom broke in, “Look, here comes another woman, swoop, down.” She waved her empty fork in an arc, following a gull’s flight. I peered out at the water. “There’s a lot of gulls out there. They’re pretty, aren’t they?” “So,” Dad seized the floor. “We didn’t go to the wicket at the International Terminal, the Hubert H. Humphrey Terminal, because I thought I remembered that they only had vending machines out there. But there’s a central area in the main terminal with a TCBY, and a Starbucks, and a Lieutenant Colonel Somebody’s fried chicken, and a Kinko’s, and you can’t eat there, but we kept walking along till we found something that looked good.” He waited a moment before adding archly, “Not fried chicken.” I nodded. “That was smart of you to remember. That you couldn’t get food out there, I mean.” Mom said, “Yes, it was good, and see now, there’s a one, two, three, four, five. Oops, and here’s another six.” I looked out again. “Are you sure? I don’t see that many.” Mom counted in a token whisper, pointing at each gull with her fork. “One, two, three.” Dad said, “So we found a sandwich place…” “Four, five, and then a four…” “Only we didn’t have sandwiches, we had soup…” “Six, seven…” “And quiche and split it.” “Seven,” Mom said more loudly. Another group of gulls circled and landed. My turn. “Well, no there’s more than seven, Mom,” I said, adding to Dad, “What kind of quiche?” “Hmmmm, let’s see. Bacon and some kind of cheese. And was there onion, or was I just worried that there might be?” He put down his fork, pressed his right forefinger under his nose, and closed his eyes. The lines on his forehead and around his eyes smoothed slightly as he sat. His day had started twelve hours ago. Traveling is stressful when you’re 81, even when you’re not caring for someone with Alzheimer’s. I wondered just how hard this day had been for him. My mother couldn’t take her eyes off the gulls. “See, look, they just, whoops, aways. Ups, and then no, they’re back. So, one, two, three, no, I got that woman already, one, two – they don’t stay still long enough for me to count them.” Mom laughed, her white curls bobbing. I shared her delight. “No onion,” Dad said, opening his eyes again. “But some kind of sprouty things on the side.” His wedding ring glowed golden in the early evening light as he waved his fingers to indicate sprouts. “Eight,” Mom said. “No, wait, no, just so – sev – seven.” “And tomato,” he said brightly. “Cut up. Well, sliced.” “Ah,” I said. “What kind of soup?” I turned to Mom. “Are you sure they don’t go under to fish, and then come up again?” “Well, yes, they might,” Mom agreed. “In any case, it’s lovely, and I’m glad to be here.” I smiled. She understands where she is. She’s glad to be here. She exclaimed, “Look, there’s about a hundred, well, no,” she laughed, “not that many, a five or so more.” Dad’s eyes were still closed in contemplation of soup. “Hey, look at that house out there,” Mom said, pointing at Caribou glistening in the evening light. “It’s got a lovely pink on it.” I seized the chance to get us all in the same conversation. “Hey, look, Dad; the sun is still shining out on Caribou.” He opened his eyes. “Broccoli cheese,” he said. I sighed. When I left to sleep at the other cottage, my parents came outside to say good night. My mother said to me, “I’ve been here so much, I don’t know whether I’m really here or just…thinking I am.” To hug her, I had to reach down. “You’re really here.” She leaned against me. We stood together in the midsummer twilight, looking out at the water, at Caribou floating in the dusk. ** I thought of that conversation in the boat on the way to Caribou. You’re really here, I had said. But where? Before climbing into the boat, I splashed one double handful of water over my face and another over my head. I settled in and we skimmed over the lake’s surface. The droning motor made talking impossible, and I didn’t want to talk anyway. The wind cooled my skin and carried away flecks of scraped paint. The sun caressed my lifted face. Family inertia. That’s my only explanation for vacationing at the lake nearly every summer of my life but never getting those last three miles out to Caribou. Mom had visited the island often in her childhood, in a motorboat her father made by adding a motor he “picked up cheap” at the dump to a wooden rowboat. Sometimes her family – my grandparents, Hugh, Mom and Allison – spent the day at Caribou, picking raspberries for jam. That motorboat was long gone by the time I was born. We never had another, and I had never missed having one. The rowboat and occasional rickety raft had always taken me as far as I needed to go. Too, boating became a problem as Mom’s illness advanced. My grandfather had taught her to respect the lake – to enjoy it while remaining alert for unexpected storms. But in her last few years, that respect became fear. She fretted when I rowed in the open bay, even just the half-mile to the smaller island. Fortunately, she stayed at the larger cottage those last few years. I lived in the smaller one and simply rowed early in the morning, before she and Dad walked over to join me, or in the long twilight evenings after she’d gone to bed. But now she was gone. I watched Caribou grow on the horizon. A thought dropped into the placid well of my contentment: If she were still alive and here, I couldn’t be on this trip. I let the wind carry the thought away over the water, ruffled beside me like a tufted bedspread. I looked down beside the boat to admire the clear water darkening, as it deepened, into a cool mallard green. ** During that 1998 summer, I stayed only a few days after getting them settled. About a week later, Dad said on the phone that he’d had to forestall Mom’s demands to go “home” by driving into town. Back at my home in Colorado, I hung up the phone and paced, desperately wanting him to be wrong. It just couldn’t be true. She was home. How could she not understand that? Fearful and heartsick, I went to the lake again, just to see for myself. My flight got in late. I stopped in at my parents’ only to say hello before heading to the smaller cottage to go to bed. We agreed that they’d walk over just before lunchtime the next day, following our usual routine. Mom was happy to see me but sleepy and ready for bed. It was impossible to tell how she was from our brief conversation, but I hoped. The next morning, sunrise through the windows of our smaller cottage woke me. I nestled in bed for a moment, watching the sunlight’s pink and gold reflections dance on the ceiling, then sat up and stretched. The cool familiar smells, a combination of damp leaves and wood smoke, water and sunlight, cleared my head. This is Mom’s home. She must feel it. Dad must be wrong. As the sun climbed the sky, I rowed leisurely in the bay. The breeze welcomed me, circling the boat a few times before disappearing. I skimmed across the water’s surface, efficient and powerful. Later, I sat on the beach with my coffee. When I heard the car pull up behind the cottage, I checked my watch. A car? At 10:30? Dad appeared around the corner of the cottage. He wore a sports coat and Hush Puppies, town clothes, instead of his usual cottage attire, a moth-eaten cardigan and tennis shoes. “Good morning,” I said in surprise. “Where’s Mom?” “Right here,” he said grimly, and there she was, following him, her mouth tight and her bright blue eyes narrowed. She too had on town clothes – a blouse and skirt with matching vest. Her hair was carefully brushed. She clutched a handbag. I stood up to kiss her. “Good morning, Mom.” She frowned. “He says he’s taking me, but he’s not.” Disgust underlined her words. “I beg your pardon?” I said, raising an eyebrow at Dad. Mom’s voice became cold and rough, her words short. “He’s supposed to take me home.” She held her purse in front of her with both hands. Dad swept his arm in an introduction. “This is how it works.” We stood in silence. I looked down at the mug I held. “How about a cup of coffee?” I said to Mom. “Well, if you must, I suppose,” she said, her voice flat and put-upon. She didn’t move. I led the way to the cottage. Mom followed, scowling. Dad brought up the rear. I lit the propane burner and put water on for instant coffee. Mom sat heavily in the rocking chair in front of the window and folded her hands over her purse. I heard myself chattering. “It’s been a gorgeous morning, hasn’t it? Bright and sunny. When I flew in yesterday, we came across the bay from the south and the city lights along the shore were beautiful.” Dad stood in the kitchen with me, looking at his fingernails. Mom stared out the window, her mouth still tight. I swallowed and forced myself into silence. When the coffee was ready, I carried a mug to Mom. “Thank you,” she said, taking a sip. The harshness had disappeared from her voice, leaving it calm, even thoughtful. “Now, I’m looking at that one.” She pointed out the window at a clump of trees – a perfectly formed balsam surrounded by a group of tall birches. “That one in the middle,” she said, accenting her words with chopping motions. “Well, let’s see, there’s the stict one and the tocked one and then there’s one that has legs just whoop, whoop, whoop, like that. And then the next ones are just…no.” She took another sip of coffee. Wary, I risked teasing her. “And I’m surprised you haven’t demanded that we cut the branches off that tree,” I said. “You always want a clear view of the water.” “Maybe so,” Mom said without taking her eyes from the view. Dad and I settled into chairs on either side of her. Bit by bit, I relaxed. The three of us drank coffee and chatted about nothing – the birds, the water, the birch trees. Mom looked down at her watch. “Let’s see, it’s…why…it’s time.” She stood up. “Time to be…some, some food.” She carried her mug into the kitchen. “Huh,” I said, checking my own watch. It was 11:45. I looked toward Dad. He said, “We’ll see you over at the other place for lunch in about a half hour.” “Sure,” I said. After they left, I stood in the kitchen. I pressed my palms into the linoleum countertop and bent my head. She won’t get well. Not even here. Not ever. ** After a half-hour in our makeshift motorboat, Caribou loomed large, its cliff towering over a tree-lined slope. We pulled up onto a rocky beach on the south side of the island. I hopped out of the boat into knee-deep water, bending to rinse my fingers and lift another handful of water to my face. About fifteen feet of beach clopped up steeply in front of me before disappearing into a tangle of evergreens and brush. I looked back across the water, searching for our cottage. Nothing distinguished it from the rest of the shoreline, not even a yellow dot through trees. Turning to the island, I walked up the beach, fighting for balance the whole way. The rocks underfoot had been scoured into smooth spheres by winter upon winter of fierce wind and waves. This side of Caribou bore the brunt of winter storms. The rocks fascinated me. I picked up one heavy, softball-shaped chunk after another, marveling. I loaded the pockets of my shorts with speckled stones: dark gray, light gray, nearly white, pink. I already had a favorite, a pink granite oval that fit perfectly into the palm of my hand. ** When we were kids, leaving the lake for our Oklahoma life was excruiciating. The night before we left, we always built a bonfire on the beach. In it, we burned clothes deemed too ragged to bring home. I was half-afraid of fire anyway, and this ritual gave me nightmares. Mom would toss a flannel shirt, still warm from the back of one of my brothers, onto the fire. Through my tears, I’d watch the shirt writhe and twitch, sink onto a log, and disappear into the roaring flames. The family gathered around a beach fire the summer my mother died, too. My father carefully laid a curl of my mother’s hair near the edge of the flames. It caught and burned cleanly. We sang the Pretty Mood lullaby that my mother had sung to us as kids, the one my grandmother had sung to my mother and to Allison, the one my oldest brother had sung at my mother’s funeral in Oklahoma three months before. I watched the sparks flying upward into the dark evening sky. Now a piece of Mom is here forever, I told myself. I tried to feel comforted. Peaceful. But I felt nothing. Later, the Aurora Borealis danced turquoise and lime-green in the navy sky, shooting streamers of cool fireworks from behind Caribou. I watched from the beach with my sister, knowing I should be impressed but wanting more. “It’s a cathedral,” my sister said. “It’s Mom.” “Yes,” I said, but only because I knew she wanted me to. I still wanted my mother back, the mother I had before the disease made her forget her home. ** Since then, time and the world have brought the peace I wanted that evening. The three-mile trip to Caribou was only the first leg on a longer journey. I said goodbye to a marriage that never worked and left a life that never fit me. Now, I sit at my desk, holding my granite egg from Caribou and thinking of my mother. I press the stone firmly between my palms and rest it against my lips. It smells wild and old and clean. I close my eyes and picture huge waves throwing my rock up onto the beach. In my mind, I watch my rock roll back toward the water only to be grabbed and thrown again, time after time – in my time, in my mother’s time before me, in her mother’s time before her. Sitting at my desk and holding my stone, I hear the lake’s music. A loon whistles in the pre-dawn gray. Waves gently tease pebbles from the beach. The wind swirls through the birches. At my desk, I lift my eyes and see Caribou itself across the water. I look for my mother at the lake each summer because I know she is here. She is home. And so am I.