Reincarnation Blues

by Michael Poore

  They made movies together. Little short films. Jerky black-and-white movies like tiny whirring storms. A girl with a flower cart, sped up until she seemed to dance on frenzied strings. A man getting beaten up by street children. A fat woman disrobing. They filmed her husband and his wife. Almost always, it was something a bit grotesque.

  Her birds performing.

  People reacting to a fake spider.

  Opium addicts sleeping, with rats crawling and sniffing among them.

  Two midgets sharing a wheelchair.

  One time they filmed an entire rainstorm, beginning to end, with puddles and people hurrying and lightning reflected in shop windows.

  They filmed themselves walking away, down the street, past a cat, past a man with a guitar, farther away, receding until someone—a fleet and criminal shadow—stole away with the camera.

  BLUE CREEK, MICHIGAN, 1897

  Suzie and Milo married. For a few years, they lived the life of a young, free couple with bright prospects. They hunted pheasant, quail, and wild turkeys, raising Irish setters to run and fetch. Suzie became the better shot, almost as if, when her finger found the trigger, something quiet and ancient moved in her.

  The first two children—Charles and James—came as planned, with one year between, and then Edith, a surprise.

  The same week Edith was born, Gerald Wedge, the Petoskey County prosecutor, handed Milo a capital case.

  “Got to cut your milk teeth sometime,” Wedge told him.

  A local businessman—Graydon Ornish—had found an intruder—Heinrick Mueller, a repeat offender—in his house and thrown him out. But he didn’t leave it at that. Ornish discovered where Mueller lived and burned his house down. Mueller and his wife both died.

  The community—one part of it, anyway—wanted Ornish acquitted. They cried out that Ornish was a good man, defending himself against a recidivist who was no good to anybody.

  “He would only have gone on robbing people,” insisted Ornish, “and maybe hurt someone.”

  The community agreed, noisily. In Petoskey County, in those days, as in many other places, the local courts often bowed to public opinion.

  Milo, however, knew his own mind and conscience.

  “The law has to prevail here,” he declared to a belligerent courtroom, to an uncertain jury, “not the way we feel about it. We aren’t here to discuss what Mr. Mueller is but what Mr. Ornish has done.”

  Young as he was, Milo stood there like an old tree, with thick glasses and hawkish nose, and in later years more than one of the spectators would say it was as if a grown-up had appeared out of thin air in a room full of foolish children.

  Ornish went to the gallows.

  Milo attended the hanging, which unfolded in its own dreamlike pocket of time, from the creak of the lever to the twitching and the dribbling of urine on the floor. It wounded him the way lightning will sometimes wound someone, on the inside.

  Five years later, when Gerald Wedge died, the party men came to Milo and said that naturally he’d want to step in as acting prosecutor, and he surprised himself by saying, “No, fellows, thanks.”

  He stopped being a prosecutor and became a defender.

  “What happened?” Suzie wanted to know.

  What had happened was that Milo had had a powerful dream. He had a lot of powerful dreams. They both did.

  “I dreamed,” Milo explained, “that I lived in South Africa, in a village, and that I committed a terrible crime. I hurt someone and took his money. But I wasn’t punished.”

  “You weren’t caught?” Suzie guessed.

  “I was caught right away. But in this particular village, when someone did something destructive, they gathered around him or her in a circle and told stories of all the good things he had done in his life. Hardly anyone ever committed a second crime. We need something like that here. Something besides punishments that only make people worse.”

  Suzie would always remember that evening, always remember him sitting sideways at his rolltop desk, one elbow at rest among papers, glasses perched on his forehead, hawkish nose dividing his face into light and shadow.

  They were quiet together for a while.

  “This may be a bad time to mention,” she said, kissing his forehead, “that I want to open a gun shop.”

  —

  Milo and Suzie were born again and again, and sometimes their life together didn’t go as they might have hoped. In one lifetime, they had planned to get married when they graduated from high school, but Suzie had a seizure while swimming in a pond and drowned before she turned seventeen.

  Her headstone was one of the new kind: engraved polished marble. It would last. It would pass through time like an arrow.

  For years after, Milo was like a piece of wood, splintering apart from inside. But he slowly got moving again and worked and grew gardens and owned cars and let the years pass. He kept her picture on his wall until it had been there for fifty years.

  Suzie’s headstone lived up to the hype; fifty years later, it might as well have been new.

  In the last summer of his own life, Milo planted a garden that grew to surround the house, nearly seventy yards of radishes, carrots, and beans, with marigolds to keep the rabbits out. Sad stories grew up around him like weeds.

  BLUE CREEK, MICHIGAN, 1932

  Thirty years went by.

  Suzie and Milo built a new house above the country-club golf course and raised the children in it. Unbelievably soon, the house wasn’t new anymore. Empty spaces opened up: when Charles went off to Dartmouth, and when James went to U of M, and Edith went to Miami, down in Ohio.

  And Milo stepped back from his project, his three-decade project, which was a diversion program for kids who broke the law, sending them to classes instead of vomiting them into the jails. He took stock of it all and, like a good wise man, knew when to step aside.

  Suzie, by contrast, had bought the whole building above and around her gun shop. Hunters all over the world were proud to own Falkner rifles. She brought in way more money than Milo ever had.

  The grandkids came. Nancy, Kimberly, Wanda, Norman, Andrew, Catherine, Curtis. Charles bought the law firm. Edith was in a horseback-riding accident.

  One day, around the time the grandkids started becoming teenagers, Milo found himself looking out at the great steel cars over in the country-club parking lot and at airliners thundering overhead. The radio squawked in the living room, behind him. Some new music called jazz.

  He thought about the sleigh-ride days, when everything had been horses, horses, horses, horses.

  “What the hell planet are we living on, anymore?” he asked aloud.

  “The Pepsodent Theatre of the Air,” said the radio, “brought to you by Pepsodent and NBC.”

  —

  Centuries later, when people perfected the OZ drive and started going out among the stars, some of them wanted to take pets along.

  Cats turned out to be perfect for space dwellers. They were excellent at floating. Didn’t seem to mind that there wasn’t really an up or down. They tended to stay out of the way.

  Milo and Suzie, born to separate litters on a space station in Pluto orbit, were among the first space cats to cross the interstellar voids. They were like two furry rockets, shooting through hatches, flying across pods. They were impeccably neat, which helped and kept cat food from getting into the ventilation.

  They grew long and thin, became like aliens.

  They napped for years at a time.

  BLUE CREEK, MICHIGAN, 1942

  Norman went off to fight in the war. His parents, Charles and Lydia, got a star, like a receipt, to hang up in their front window.

  Milo made an unofficial star out of linen and hung it in the front window at the big house, on the side away from the golf course.

  He and Suzie went hunting. It became their way of keeping watch over their grandson, in whatever far field he camped in or marched on. Norman marched across northern Africa; his grandparents marched the fields and woods a
round Sand Lake.

  When Norman was killed at Anzio, they looked at each other and leaned against each other, the only alternative to sinking down on the floor. Then they geared up and went hunting, anyhow, stomping the winter-brittle weeds and wheat, skirting the frozen lake, taking note when the dogs quit the trail at their feet and sniffed the air instead.

  A bear rose out of the winter wheat just yards away. An old bear, with a fading coat and scars.

  “Dogs!” barked Milo, a simple command and a simple gesture, and the dogs sat down, as they’d been taught.

  Suzie aimed quickly but with care.

  Crack! Crack crack! said Suzie’s rifle. The bear lay dying, fast and painlessly, shot straight through the eye and then double-tapped through the heart.

  “Jesus, Suze,” said Milo. “I thought it would be like a poem, where we look at him and he looks at us, and then we just let each other turn away and go. Later on we’d tell how he was close enough that we could see the specks in his eyes and the wind in his fur.”

  “This isn’t a poem,” she snapped.

  When they got home, Milo went out and bought some crayons and made them an unofficial gold star to hang in the window. He took down his original star and laid it on the coffee table, unable to bring himself to throw it away.

  Suzie came along later and put it in the trash.

  —

  They came back, in more than one life, to live in the wine country (who wouldn’t?). They came back and lived in villages, in forests, and in huts by the sea.

  They learned kung fu and knitting. They learned more ways to make love than any other lovers had ever known. Sometimes they remembered the things they had learned from other lives. When they were seven years old on Rapa Nui, in 1700, they remembered that they had flown on starships. They saw the starships in their dreams, and carved surfboards in their image, and learned to fly on the water.

  They came back as two Navajo women. They came back as lungfish and banana farmers.

  Sometimes they died together, or a few minutes apart, and sometimes one or the other faced long years alone.

  BLUE CREEK, MICHIGAN, 1947

  Two years after the war had come to a stop, Milo and Suzie sat on their front porch swing, on the evening of their fiftieth wedding anniversary. Their thin, veiny old hands lay tangled together in her lap. Their children and grandchildren bustled inside the house, preparing supper. The homemade gold star hung in the window still, for Norman.

  The dogs curled up together nearby, faking sleep.

  Milo leaned close and said, “I’m proud of you, Suzie.”

  Cooking smells drifted out through the screen door, as if the house were breathing pumpkin pie and onions.

  Suzie said, “Mmm?” because she didn’t hear well, so he repeated, “I’m proud of you.”

  And she squeezed his hand and rested her head on his shoulder and laughed, and said, “That’s all right, love. I’m tired of you, too.”

  For Dad and Barbara

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Every book has friends.

  Some of these friends are people who actually help the book get written. Maybe they read and offer advice. Maybe they’re agents or editors or people who spark ideas. Others are people who are friends of the book because they are friends of the writer in some way. And of course there are readers, the best friends any book has.

  Man, this book sure has a lot of friends.

  The list begins with my wife and friend, writer and poet Janine Harrison. Janine has been excited about Reincarnation Blues since I first mentioned it and has been a tireless cheerleader and adviser. She is also much more, of course.

  My agent, Michelle Brower, dropped into my life by telephone one day some time ago, saying, “I like your style. Would you like to try and publish books together?” She changed my life, and I thank her with all my heart. It should not go without saying that this book was actually sort of dumb as a first draft, and Michelle guided me toward the light. Everything that’s good about Reincarnation Blues has her mental fingerprints on it. Her assistant, Annie Hwang, can also share in whatever credit is due.

  Tricia Narwani, my editor at Del Rey, was wild about the book and is also fun to drink beer with. She, too, guided me through some changes. In the nicest way. You know how some writers will tell you that working with their editors and publishers was pure, raw hell and that the book they wound up with was hardly their book anymore? I have never experienced that. Tricia and Del Rey have been good and gentle friends.

  A humble thank-you to Alice Walker for her pamphlet Sent by Earth: A Message from the Grandmother Spirit After the Bombing of the World Trade Center and the Pentagon (Seven Stories Press, 2001). The story of the wise, loving people in chapters 9 and 27 is inspired and informed by Walker’s account of the Babemba tribe, appearing in this essay.

  I have had valuable input and encouragement from many of the usual suspects. Josh Perz. Ted Kosmatka. Rachel Mork. Mary-Tina Vrehas. My dad, Don Poore, basically told me how he thought I should rewrite the first chapter, and he was right.

  As always, Mom and Bill have been a source of encouragement and support. Plus it’s nice to go hang out at their house, which has a pond and a cool indoor-outdoor porch kind of thing, which is a perfect place to write and watch the ducks.

  Sometimes a book’s friends are groups of people.

  I’d like to thank Janine’s group of writerly students from Purdue, the First Friday Wordsmiths, especially Kevin Shelton and Kayla Greenwell. I started this book during a FFW retreat on a farm in southern Michigan, at a farmhouse table full of young people drinking coffee and tapping away on laptops. In the evening, there was a bonfire and stars and lightning bugs. What a fine setting for starting a book.

  There’s a group of people in Muncie, Indiana, who have been so good to me I don’t even know where to start. Writer and professor Cathy Day and I exchanged books and became friends some time ago, and she got poet Sean Lovelace to invite me down to Ball State for a reading. That evening remains one of my favorite nights ever. Cathy, Sean, Silas Hanson, and several of the young writers I met that week—Brittany Means, Sarah Hollowell, Jackson Thors Elfin, Jeff Owens, and Jeremy Flick—have been with me in my head and heart ever since.

  As always, the writers of the Highland Writers’ Group have been a trusty source of criticism and support.

  And the Mean Group, the meanest and most snack-eating crit group ever. We’re back together and meaner and snack-eatinger than ever.

  And thanks to those who have read and continue to read. I offer you a courtly bow.

  BY MICHAEL POORE

  Up Jumps the Devil

  Reincarnation Blues

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  MICHAEL POORE’s short fiction has appeared in Glimmer Train, Southern Review, Agni, Fiction, and Asimov’s. His story “The Street of the House of the Sun” was selected for The Year’s Best Nonrequired Reading 2012. His first novel, Up Jumps the Devil, was hailed by The New York Review of Books as “an elegiac masterpiece.”

  Poore lives in Highland, Indiana, with his wife, poet and activist Janine Harrison, and their daughter, Jianna.

  michaelpoore.live

  Facebook.com/​michaelpooreauthor

  Twitter: @michaelpoore007

  Instagram: @michael_poore227

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