and this one:

Sun And Suffering in <b
style='mso-bidi-font-weight:normal'>Texas<b
style='mso-bidi-font-weight:normal'>

It was a pleasant day for Hoviston Texas.
The sky was deep blue and cloudless. The sun beat down, of course- the Sun was
a constant in Texas life. Terry
had been out of Hoviston, out of Texas
long enough for that constant of local life to seem an oppressing fact. When he
left the airport in Dallas, it was
crushing. It was like walking into a lit oven. Its as
if he had forgotten what it was like to live in Texas,
forgotten how to cope. But old habits die hard- he had remembered the slow
pace, the loose clothes. Remembered to walk where the shade
was. Remembered how to make the most out of every
breeze. Remembered how to forget the oppression of the
sun.

Heather was walking with him, there along the old graveled
road. Walking in much the same way as they had walked
together 10 years ago as children- or if not children then at least not adults.
Behind them was a church. To the right of them they were passing a large sign,
visible like the church, to the highway far down the hill to their left. The
sign said ‘Jesus is Lord over Hoviston’. The sign glared blindingly white under
the sun. The heat was exquisite in his black suit, and his right dress shoe had
already picked up a lovely collection of gravel.

They walked along the old gravel road to the ‘brook’, although
it only held water for a brief time every Spring and
Fall. Now it simply held color- a cascade of green willows and licorice-scented
Sumac flowing between shallow hills coated with brittle dry buffalo grass. The
residual water in the ground keeping the life vibrant green while all else
dried up under the summer sun.

“Heather, why did you stay?” Terry asked- the question
surprised him. Here they were walking away from the funeral of her husband and
his childhood friend, and all he could think to ask was this old unanswered
question?

Heather gave her old smirk, the one she wore when she teased
him. The disarming one. The
patronizing one. It always infuriated him, but now it was the closest
thing to a smile he had seen form her this week. She
licked her lips. “Come on, Terry… he
wasn’t that bad a husband”

Terry felt as if he had been slapped. “Nono”,
he waved his hands. “Good God, no. I mean here, in
Hoviston- Why did you stay? You hated it here. You had a scholarship at <span
class=GramE>UT, you said you loved it there. Why did you leave there and
stay here? ”

“Oh that…”, She said

“Its just that, I don’t think it was Jack… I mean you guys
got together that summer and you never went back after your first semester,
after winter break… Why did you stay here of all places? Why didn’t you go back
to School? I never understood that”

“Well, you never asked”, she retorted

“I asked you plenty of times”, he said back- confused again.
“No, you never asked me why I didn’t go back- You only asked me why I stayed,
and really only after you heard from Jack that we were together and that I
wasn’t going back for Spring semester”, Heather commented flatly.

“I see”, Terry said- but he didn’t really… He was really
only buying time to think through what Heather had said. Terry never really
understood Her. Heather was a lot less direct than
Terry. Terry liked parsimony, liked simplicity. He liked his heart-to-heart
conversations succinct and plainly stated. She did not use words to cloud or
hide, but she had grown up with parents that bordered on the abusive…<span
style='mso-spacerun:yes'> She preferred to use her words to aim people
at her intended meaning, so that she could always digress or escape or slide
away if they took offense. It frustrated Terry, but he and Heather had played
this game out many times in the distant past, and he slipped into the roll
really without thinking.

After chewing on his tongue for a moment.
“Yeah, I wasn’t there much for you our Freshman year.
You’re right, and I’m sorry… And I guess I lost touch with you from the get go…
That was shabby of me… And I didn’t come back home, here, that Christmas… But
If you think I was jealous about you and Jack, you couldn’t be more wrong”, he
fired off bluntly. Heather looked at him dead on for a moment, with a look like
she was holding something sour in her mouth. She looked at him like he had
entirely missed the point, and somehow pitied him for it.

“Well, then what?” Terry said, his
frustration becoming manifest.

The look on her face faded as fast as it had come. Something
passed over her eyes, and he knew what was next. She would change the subject.
“The service went well, don’t you think?”, she said as
if commenting about the sky. It was a perfectly executed move. How could he
deny this topic to a widow? She would talk around the point, and then she would
push him from the other direction at whatever it was she wanted him to see. He
hated this fucking dance, but he could not stop moving to it. Heather was all
that was left for him in Hoviston, all that he cared
about or could care about from his childhood. It was a necessity for him to
restore the link that had decayed over the years.

It had been a lousy ceremony- stuck sweating on a pew in a
poorly air-conditioned drafty turn-of-the century small town church listening
to the parson drone on about the redemption of Christ in between testimonials
of Jacks friends and family. Funerals in this part of the world were like that-
an opportunity to herd souls to Christ, to flash the inevitability of death
before the flock and shove them, lovingly or not, into the waiting arms of ‘The
Savior’. Such an opportunity, it probably gave the preacher a brimstone
hard-on. Jack would have wanted to burn the church to the ground, as Terry did.

“Yes, well, I think there was a bit more fire and brimstone
than Jack would have tolerated”, he shot back.

She laughed, despite his peevishness: “Yes, if I recall the
three of us once plotted how to burn that church down. Thank god we were
getting high at the time, and never finished the plans.”,
She laughed “Hoviston never knew that the heart of its community was saved by a
quarter ounce of Ditch Weed and a Bong ”. Despite himself, Terry did laugh.
Heresy always got him off, as Heather knew. “<span
class=GramE>mmmmm…. Frito Pie!”, Terry
barked. They both chuckled their way down the road for a few paces.

She quieted for a moment, then said
in an even tone: “Funerals are for the community of the survivors, Terry. I
played my part and so did you. So did the Church. I had… lots of time to deal
with Jacks death”

Another voluminous statement. Terry
lowered his voice and said hesitantly “Heth, I, um, noticed you seem to be
doing a lot better about this than you seemed to be at the funeral”, He used
his old nick-name for her- ‘Heth’... If she noticed she didn’t let on. The
statement was poking at something far deeper.

She flushed a bit. “Damn, Terry, You knew Jack. You knew
someday you would be back here to bury him. Grieving for Jack came hand in hand
with loving him.”, her hand was trembling as she
fished in her purse for a cigarette. She started to light it, but stopped, “You
should be glad… I’m <i
style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>glad I still had some of it left for the
funeral. It was my job to do the grieving widow, just as it was your job to do
the Old Friend Returneth. We both did our parts, don’t tell me you didn’t worry
about looking contrived yourself!”. What she said was
true. “I know Heth, I’m not saying it to judge you… I
guess I had hoped that maybe the years would mellow him…”,
Terry said. “A comforting fantasy fed with carefully maintained distance. It
was easier for you to stay away”, Heather said- unusually direct- a habit she
apparently had picked up over the last 10 years. “I know”, Terry admitted.

They walked on towards the brook. They were nearly there
before either of them spoke again. Heather crushed the butt against an old
fence-post as she suddenly left the road. “Where are you going?” asked Terry.
“Where else? The Old Town
cemetery, want to come?”. Terry was at a bit of a loss
for words. The last time they had been at the Old
Town cemetery…. As if to highlight
that point, Heather bunched her dress up to climb over the dilapidated wood
fence, showing supple, smooth tan legs. Heather was still breath-taking,
achingly beautiful. The kind of beauty that hushed rooms upon
her entry. It had been too easy to forget, somehow, as they walked from
the church. Too easy to see her as the Widow of his
high-school buddy.

“Don’t worry, I wont take advantage of you in your time of
grief.”, she said with an impish grin as if reading
his mind, “ Come on, I need to show you something”. She was over the fence now.
Terry followed, his very expensive hard-soled street shoes crunching down
buffalo grass, stickers already coating his even more expensive slacks. How
silly he felt, barging through the tall grass and bushes- he remembered that as
a kid he could move at a dead run through this stuff- finding the game trails
and runoff paths that formed an invisible highway under the brush. Heather was
far ahead of him, despite her substantially more impractical apparel. He felt
very much like he didn’t belong, that he was trespassing.

“Watch for chips, Terry”, she called out from ahead, just as
he barely saved his left shoe from a shellacking from a cow pie. He was
focusing too much on his clumsy feet to notice that she was hiking them to the
ravine that was left behind by the ‘brook’. He nearly stumbled into the rocky
dry bed. Looking up he noticed that it was pleasant here- the willows growing
from the side of the banks made an almost tunnel along the gentle slope of the
wash bed. Heather waited, he guessed, up stream. It seemed to him that she was
enjoying his helplessness. “Come on, you remember the way… Up around the bend
and up the next hill”.

“Look, Heth, why are
we going there. I have not been there since high-school”, Terry asked, trying
not to sound demanding. He added: “and I for damn sure ain’t
dressed for this” (he winced at the ain’t
as soon as it left his mouth). “I remember just fine when you last were there…”
She said thickly. Why is
she referring back to that, he wondered. It made him uncomfortable.
Terry had few hang-ups, and Heather seemed to be batting this one around for
fun. He shot her a look.

“Look, Terry, the
only meaningful communication you and I have had over the last 10 years has
been centered around you wanting to know why I stayed
here. When you asked first I was too young and way too fucked up to tell you,
and then later I simply didn’t have the words. I still don’t. I can show you, I
think, now that you have blessed us again with your presence. You can follow me
and watch and listen, or you can get back in your rental sedan and go back to your first-class ticket out of Hoviston and
your over-paid Job. I would like it if you stayed for a bit. I still know you
enough to be pretty sure that you aren’t going back until I tell you what you
want to hear, so why don’t you stop complaining?” She turned in a caricature of
a huff and walked off up the gravel bed. Terry had no option but to follow.
Regardless, she had hit the nail on the head. He had no intention of heading
back until she gave him what he wanted.

The Old Town
cemetery used to be their ‘hang out’. The three of them had formed the core of
what little youth ‘counter culture’ there had been in Hoviston High. The Old
Town cemetery was located on a plot
of land owned by the Town and ceded to the Church. Nobody took care of it,
nobody knew much about it, nobody cared and what was better, nobody lived near
it. Nobody even really knew why it was called the ‘Old
Town’ cemetery. The only way to
reach it was to hike down the old brook bed, or take a short drive in a pickup
over a ‘road’ that was abandoned long before the first car arrived in Texas.

The three of them and a few others in their clique had
turned the Old Cemetery and the ancient old church next to it into their
hang-out of last resort- a place to go and be left alone when there was nothing
else to do and nowhere else to go, which in Hoviston was most nights they could
get out and away from their folks. They would cruise up there in Jacks truck
with the lights killed- firewood, boom-box and a tent in the back, and whatever
the chemical-du-jour was (usually cheap beer or Jim
Beam, but sometimes something more interesting). The pale sound of the scraping
of buffalo grass and tumbleweed against the trucks belly and the trek over a
landscape blasted of color by the pale moonlight would give a sense of
separation and distance and discovery that they had all yearned for. Escape
from Hoviston was a deliverance they all craved deeply.

For Terry and Heather and most of the rest of the kids, the
booze, weed and other accouterments were an escape- but it turned out for Jack
it was the start of something else. They were too young to see it in him, but
while the two of them could leave the drugs behind, Jack never could. It
started to become clear their last year together, when he stopped going to High
School and would disappear for days at a time. It only got worse with Jack over
the last decade. Pills, powders, grass and booze, it seems, was his life.
Somehow Heather fit in there… Somehow. And somehow it
had been enough of a place for her to stay, in the place she could not abide,
married to a dying addict. It made no sense.

But that was later. It had been innocent once in this
Cemetery. Terry had fond memories of the place, fond memories of the nights of
heart-felt conversations that seemed so deep and earth-shattering at the time,
fond memories of the chemical and sexual experimentation, fond
memories of the sense of family he had felt with his partners in crime. <span
class=GramE>Dancing in the moonlight to the music of his youth. Leaping
the fire-pit while flying high on youth and the limited immortality it granted.
He supposed that if there was anywhere left in Hoviston he wanted to call home, it would have been that Cemetery.

They left the ravine bed and walked up in silence to where
the Cemetery and the old Church lay nestled in between two hills. It looked
much better tended now than it had in his youth. While still wild, the Buffalo
grass had been cut back to a reasonable level. The litter was gone. A small
picket fence was the only new structure on the land, and it encircled the
Cemetery.

“Wow, the place has changed”, Terry said. “More than you
know”, Heather nodded. “There is a care-taker now”, she pointed at the old
Truck. “It turns out this little plot has an interesting history, and the Town
is now a bit more interested in preserving it than it used to be.”

“And what would the history be?”,
Terry said, suddenly struck that he never really put too much thought into it.
Youth had little interest in the dead and the past, he supposed- but he was not
exactly young now (at least he thought so), and found himself quite interested
in both.

“It turns out that these were all freed slaves. They pooled
what little they had, and with some help from some Black Cherokee as guides,
they headed west to make their own lives. They settled in the hills around what
would become Hoviston and tried to make a go of it growing Cotton. It was all
they knew how to do. Turns out Cotton won’t grow for shit around here. So they
starved and dwindled slowly over the years. A small-pox epidemic pretty much
wiped them out eventually, before the Proper White Folk of Hoviston showed up
to settle the valley. This is where most of them are buried”, she said. Terry
suspected he was getting the executive summary. He suspected that she knew volumes
about these people and their lives, and that this was the inside-leaf teaser on
the dust jacket.

“And why is the town now more interested now, and less
interested before?”. Terry asked- suspecting the
answer already.

“Yeah, well, funny thing. See, they
were all Black, but the surnames on a few of the headstones match some of the
names of the earliest Hoviston settler families. Jacobson,
Jackson, Smith… etc. Put it together and … ”

“… You get implications the Lily White Folk of Hoviston
don’t exactly want to face up to<span
style='mso-spacerun:yes'> ”, Terry finished. She smiled at him

“Turns out that there was a reason the good folk of Hoviston
wanted to both preserve and forget this place at the same time, why it made
such a good hide-out for us kids. But times are different now, attitudes are
starting to change. ”, she took on a more sarcastic tone, “and a lot of these
folks have Cherokee names … its quite fashionable
these days to have a Native American hanging from your family tree, and not
even from a rope, fashionable enough to forget the Black half of the graveyard
at least”. Her expression showed what she thought of such attitudes. “The Good
White Folk of Hoviston miss the point entirely, even now. These dead are the
real heritage of Hoviston, and what few of them survived<span
style='mso-spacerun:yes'> apparently married in with the white
settlers that arrived with the rail-roads and land grants”.

“But I still don’t get it”, Terry said, “What does this show
me? My family wasn’t Hoviston-Born, neither was yours. Why does this show me
why you stayed here?”. She looked at him again, she
seemed to be enjoying herself now- he had thought that her mirth had been at
his expense since they left the road, he was starting to wonder now, though, if
it had little to do with him- that something about this moment was giving her a
sense of ironic joy.

“Oh, you used to be much more patient Terry”, she said,
dripping double entendre. Just before he was about to confront her on it, she pointed
over at the large flat slab of sandstone at the end of the cemetery, ‘the
altar’ they used to call it. It was where they had fucked, finally, after what
seemed like years of flirtations- right before they left to their respective
colleges. A youthful fantasy fulfilled for both of them, and a good-bye fling.
“You remember that stone?” She asked. “Yeah, the ‘altar’, how could I forget?”
he said, answering all possible meanings of her question, explicit or implicit.
She nodded, and said in a matter-of-fact tone: “Its
really where you last saw me for who I was, As who you remembered I was. Its
why I couldn’t find the words to tell you ”. She
looked as someone deep in thought as she strode over to the stone and sat down
on it.

“I was quite a young woman, wasn’t I” She looked distant.
“Young and powerful. I took what I want from the boys I wanted, and didn’t care
about the rumors and names”, she said quietly. “I was my own woman”… “Yes, you
did Heather. Its one of the things I admired about you”, said Terry softly, not
sure where she was going and a little perturbed by the blatant use of the past
tense.

Life for a Hoviston
girl was not easy. In that small a town, everyone slept with everyone, and
everyone knew about it. A combination of intense boredom and
intense closeness. In Hoviston, everyone was a ‘slut’. But if you came
from the Right Family, you were virginal, no matter what, and if you came from
the wrong family, you were a dirty whore, no matter what. And that’s how the
boys treated you, no matter what. Heather seemed to have escaped that cruel <span
class=GramE>game, it didn’t seem to bother her what the boys whispered.
She conquered boys just as they would have tried to use her. It was the first
encounter Terry had with a sexually confident woman, an oasis of female power
in the misogynistic dessert of Small Town Rural South. And where the Hoviston
boys were terrified of it, of her, Terry was quite taken with it. While he had
never been in love with Heather, she had shaped what he wanted and expected out
of women more than any woman he had loved.

“Well, Terry, to get to the point: I was raped near the end
of my first semester at UT. By my English TA. <span
class=GramE>Very brutally. I don’t know, or don’t remember what he did
to me, but I needed 20 stitches on my scalp before it was over.” Terry felt
like he had been punched in the stomach. He stood there, over some unknown <span
class=GramE>fellows grave, suddenly not knowing what to do with his
hands, or what to say.

“Despite all my airs of sophistication and confidence, I was
naïve, I should have caught the signs… They were
probably there, but I don’t remember them… All I remember was that he was
older, quiet, sophisticated and interested
in me, or at least I thought so. We agreed to go out in secret so he
wouldn’t jeopardize his standing with
his peers, it was so stupid, we wrote
letters to each other, and exchanged
them after class. We talked about Critical
Theory for fuck sake!! <span
class=GramE>After the boys in Hoviston? he
could have had me, would have had me. But as soon as we were alone in his room,
all I remember is his belt around my throat and his coffee breath in my face.
”, She paused, verging on tears, her voice and body shaking, “I <i
style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>fucking hate coffee now, Terry”, it
seemed such an understatement for the story.

Terry started walking over to her, unsure what to do. She
held out her hand. “Its okay Terry.
The story will always hurt to tell, but its in the
past. I’m as over it as I’m going to get. I don’t need your comforting, that’s
not why I took you here”. Terry settled for sitting next to her.

“The point is Terry, that a part of
me was dead for a very long time after that, the part of me that I knew you
admired and remembered and related to. My freedom, my
fearlessness, my confidence- all of it gone. <span
style='mso-spacerun:yes'> That’s why I couldn’t really tell you why I
didn’t come back to school, To tell the truth I didn’t
even want you to know”. The tears that had welled up in, but not escaped her
eyes were already drying. Terry tried to digest the story, and a cold
realization took hold of him. “You mean you stayed here because of what happened
to you?” he said, unable to keep any hint of incredulousness entirely out of
his question. The Heather he remembered would never have given that much up to
her assailant.

“Oh I know what you’re thinking, and its bullshit. I <i
style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>knew that you would not have understood
back then, and maybe can’t even now. I didn’t stay here to hide from what happened to me, nor did I stay here because I was
ashamed. I never was some weeping
delicate flower, Terry, I was not
beaten by him, or by being raped” <span
style='mso-spacerun:yes'> She paused for a moment, dug out a
cigarette, then continued “I wanted to press charges, but he didn’t leave any
semen behind… It turns out that happens a lot, I didn’t know, but it does. I
was wearing a skirt, so no torn clothes… And they didn’t find any hair down
there, and even if they did all I had was a bad bump on my head and his word
against mine. There was probably a lot of blood from my scalp left behind in
his room, but my word alone wasn’t good enough for a search warrant. The only
witnesses had seen a young couple flirting and laughing together. I started the
process, but the DA assigned to my case took me aside at one point and told me
I wouldn’t win. I never knew if he had ‘gotten
a call’ from a connected relative of the TA, or if he was trying to shield
me from a rape trial because he thought I couldn’t take it. He was a prick
either way, and either way I didn’t want to go to trial with that worthless
wonder by my side. I stopped participating, and they just dropped the charges. By
the time it was all over I was failing half my classes, including English which
I of course never showed up for afterwards, and I was losing my scholarship. I
could have thrown myself at the feet of the dean, of the administrators of the <span
class=GramE>scholarship, I could have stayed- But why? To see that
asshole leer at me when we passed on campus? No, lets just say I took a break”

“And came back here- but why? Heth, I know your family- “,
he went on with a softened voice: ”I hate to say this,
but I doubt they would have been much help to you…”, he said cautiously. “<span
class=GramE>Obviously. I never told them. To this day, they don’t know”,
she said coldly. Terry nodded. Heathers family was conservative for even
Hoviston, and even the typical Hoviston response to Heathers dilemma would have
been shame, and at least a question or two about what she had done
to ‘get’ raped. Life in a small Texas
town, Terry marveled silently, could be deeply and profoundly screwed up. <span
class=GramE>Its why he left and never came back.

“But I still have not
answered your question, Terry”, Heather said. “You’ve said plenty Heth, I’m so
sorry. Its okay.”, Terry said. “Don’t say that, not
about this”, Heather said impatiently. “Don’t say what?”,
Terry asked, again feeling like he had been left behind somewhere. <span
class=GramE>“’Sorry’. About me being raped. The
only person who should ever feel sorry is that fuckwit little animal of a man
(she crushed out her butt while saying this). I’m not sorry. Not for him, not
for me. Do me a favor and don’t <span
style='mso-spacerun:yes'> you<i
style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'> be sorry for me. I don’t want that.
God, I fucking hate that”, <span
style='mso-spacerun:yes'> she said. Terry didn’t really know what
to say, so he just nodded. She flipped her spent butt away over the fence, and
continued

“The question you asked always is why I stayed. I just told
you why I left school. I didn’t tell you why I stayed here in this shit <span
class=GramE>hole”, Heather was as profane as she had always been.
Profanity from her subtle mind and beautiful mouth had always struck Terry as
somehow poignant and so much more meaningful, not that he would ever Tell
Heather that… not because he didn’t want to face her wrath at the
condescention, but because he couldn’t own up to that condescention. “And
that’s where this Cemetery comes in?” asked Terry.

“Bingo. Think about it, Terry. Why would I
find this story so magnetizing?
Why would it speak to me? Come on, I know you tried your hand at being a
writer, you of all people should know”, She said- a bit of the wry smile
returning. Terry was rocked back on his heels. His book of short stories had
been published, at a considerable fee, to no acclaim or celebrity. It vanished
into some black hole of literature, never to be seen again. He told nobody, not
even his parents about it, too afraid at the moniker ‘failed writer’. The one review he had read, on amazon.com, from a <i
style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>reader (not even rating a <span
class=GramE>critics pen!) who
somehow stumbled across it read something like ‘Meaningless ramblings full of
characters falling all over themselves trying to sound pithy and generally
failing. A toss up between sallow and shallow’.

“I know how to google a name, Terry.
I’m not a complete bumpkin”, Heather said, enjoying her barb. Terry stared intently
at a shrub, located far enough over his right shoulder so that Heather was out
of his view. A stir of wind picked up a flight of hoppers, taking flight with a
gentle whiiiring
noise. He was sorry, so deeply sorry, no matter how much Heather didn’t want to
hear it. He was beginning to understand why the barbs and jabs today. She
couldn’t help but resent him. He wasn’t there for her over the past decade, and
instead showered her with judgmental questions from afar. A one-time
trusted comrade in arms who made himself too distant to understand, swooping in
with but one question on his arrogant lips. He couldn’t really digest
this view of himself <span
style='mso-spacerun:yes'> right now, the depth of it, so he
answered Heathers question: “Because they escaped from bondage only to be impersonally
destroyed and forsaken”, Terry said quietly.

“Oooh!
Good shot, dead on, if a bit dramatically put. You have a knack for metaphor! You
know, I read your book. I liked it. I saw some of myself in the characters you
wrote about. It made me forgive a lot. It reminded me of why we were best
friends back then”, Heather said. She sensed that perhaps she had hit him hard
enough, and was trying to smooth his feelings. She wasn’t lying, though, he
could tell. He loved her for it.

“You’re right, I saw their struggle
as something like my own. Not at first, obviously. At first all I saw was a
mystery in plain sight. I came here, after I got back, to be alone. I won’t
deny I felt a certain fascination with death, perhaps even envied them for
their not having to exist anymore. What can I say, I was young and wounded and
that’s what the young and wounded do. But somewhere in the mourning, here, I
got curious about who they had been, how they had died and why they were so
forsaken. My parents had no interest in me being back, so I was crashing on
Jacks’ couch back then and living off pocket change. It didn’t start off as a
deep interest at first, but at least it was something,
so I went with it.”

“Turns out that the county Public Library had all the old
records, buried in the basement. I made friends with this absurdly crazy old
gal there that ran the place, and for some reason she not only helped me track
down the records and oral histories, but she managed to find me a job in the
stacks. She became my best friend over time. A may December
sort of affair. She mothered me and it was what I needed”

“And then Jack. What can I say? We’ll have to get to that
before you leave. You’re wrong, he was the main reason I stayed- but you’re
right that it wasn’t at first.”