Chapter Fourteen

Husbandry and Homeland Security

“ … all the time fresh air, sunshine and good water.”

--- Flying Hawk, the South Dakota plains, 1852 – 1931 CE

Constructing Grace’s Listening curriculum presented itself as nowhere nearly as involved as even one Halloween, Thanksgiving Day, Bodhi Day, Human Rights Day, Chanukah, Winter Solstice, Christmas, Kwaanza, New Year’s Day, Valentine’s Day, International Women’s Day, Vernal Equinox or Earth Day celebration and gathering for the Truemaier Boys though. The last – of – the – year’s holidays were again upon us as they were upon all of the kids and all of their families and neighbors, at school, at Herry’s branch, everywhere.

Except Quaker Meeting. What a beautiful respite Quaker Meeting is at this time of the vatican nation’s gregorian calendar, that time – and – event construct put together and made so fuckingly important by squatty, robed and allegedly holy men. Only things we Quakers did were four. Contributed dollars and labor to and served during the Community Thanksgiving Day Dinner. Dished up scrumptious victuals to about 400 of the community every single late November and not just to the ‘poor’ either. Not in Ames. Everyone who wants to eat or scrub pots and pans alongside some stranger comes. Sang carols at about three different nursing homes. And held the Frugal at the Meetinghouse, really a usual monthly thing and often hosted in Quakers’ homes during other months. Usual this particular one was, too, except for that extra event which occurs inside Twelfth Month’s Frugal every year: the White Elephant Holiday Gift Exchange. The Boys’ and my first time since it was our first holiday season with the Ames Friends Meeting, ‘Friends’ being the original name of Quakers. That is, we all were first known as the Religious Society of Friends. Then Friends took on for ourselves as our own moniker the mocking and the taunting meant to demean us that is the noun Quaker; but that’s another story, and something we see happen in other areas of life from time to time. Ergo ... as another such example, the noun ... mother – fucking.

Herry’d come to Quaker Meeting I think three times in Columbia where we had all first hooked up with the Friends 01 Eleventh Month 1983, on the recommendation then of a visiting academic agriculturist / rural sociologist to whom I had been introduced in an international agriculture seminar course which I took there during graduate school and who knew about the Quakers’ humanitarian aid projects through the American Friends Service Committee, the Quakers’ domestic and foreign quests. Herry gloriously and grandly talked – that more talk and more talk of his – of our family of five doing such Friends’ work in Central America, specifically in Costa Rica, the safest, the richest and the most comfortable country in the region.

Instead of that happening at all, Herry and I evolved very, very quickly into the subjects of a Clearness Committee meeting convened by two or three intervening and allegedly neutral Friends Meeting members because Dr. Herod Edinsmaier had requested one. When I wouldn’t do something Herry wanted – subsequently about which at the time, I don’t even remember what specific one that something was.

When this one certain committee meeting, then, didn’t go his way from its very ‘clear’ git – go, why, Herry quit Quaker Meeting and Quakerism. Like a hot coal. Like a “not exciting” – enough female. Like he quit soccer – coaching us dud – mothers’ kiddies. Right now. And never went there again. He’s never been to Costa Rica once. Still. And not to any other Central American country either. That humanitarian stuff ’d all be just so much ... well, work! Even with that homeland’s excused – away – as – ‘cultural’ aprovechar and pervasive machismo corruption.

So I took the Boys alone. Where before have we all read this chapter and verse in godly men’s instructional catechisms, especially on how to teach their own itty bitty ones on their so heralded and supposedly belovéd and o – so righteous religious canons, edicts, laws and precepts? Complacently,

as a matter of fact. If men, fathers, patriarchs themselves are accountable for it. Women, as far as the children’s learning about the churchy, androcentric religions is concerned, have had to do the work of it all – inside the Western World at least.

As far as any of it mattered to Herry, he was a vehemently avowed and very dyed – in – the – wolf’s – wool atheist and had married me some eleven years earlier as only such. In the Memorial Lutheran Church in Ames, though, during one of my Missouri Synod throwback episodes to Mehitable and AmTaham which

I, back then, seemed to suffer from – from time to time. And under which same primitive reversions so, so many American adult female children still irrationally operate. Blindly and blitheringly and blatheringly following, as they most surely are, with their very own babies in tow Grandma’s and Grandpa’s religious fuck right over the mother – fucking precipice and down to their own and their babes’ utterly and entirely preventable demises. ... IF only these women, these mamas, had been strong enough to first recognize that they actually possess and then go ahead and assert their very own ... scientific mindsets! Their own know–ledge of ... reason! Of what is and what is not reason–able!

Hardly Woodstock – esque our wedding was. Done up, the marrying ritual at least, all nice and neat and legal and proper and christian – like by a fully ordained and pious guy there called a reverend or a minister or some such patriarchal en‘title’ment who pronounced stuff down upon both Herry and me exactly one week – 18 December 1976 – before that stuff – and – more – stuff event known in christian Western Hemispheric denominations as christmas day.

On that very same date in 1971, somewhere else in the country, Memphis I believe, Lionel was united

in matrimony to Grace and promised there to her all of those very same things that Herod was now just

a half a decade later avowing to me back up here in wintry Iowa. Uncannily coincidental, huh? Elsewhere too, I presume, people were wedding other people about that same Winter Solstice time in 1976, and, as simultaneously as we two were betrothing, they were also making solid, unswerving pledges to each other themselves.

How utterly silly this is, I am thinking today. It is impossible for all the humans I know to actually believe, even at the very time that they are saying this stuff out loud to each other, that they are going to be any different and actually keep true what they’ve just affirmed. What they’ve just stated out loud that they will. There’s that willingness problem thing.

A research study couldn’t be done because of its massiveness; but I would like to know just how many of those couples who plighted themselves to each other that very same day in history, Worldwide, actually kept those promises in all ways and are so connected still today nearly 24 years later. Key and central to the study would be how, honestly now, do they both feel today and all during the years intervening as compared to how they felt about themselves and the promises that they so freely gave away on that actual day of promising.

No wonder that a few folks do re – vowing, repledging deals at their temples or mosques or blessing circles or meetinghouses or wherever. All other licensures, certifications and registrations that I can think of have to be redone and revised and renewed and refreshed periodically, and actually often those periods are. It only seems logical to have to refresh this thing called promising each other. Like really, really often, too. So folks would not have a chance to forget. One Simple Observation of the Earth.

Since the research would reveal, yes, I venture to speculate, less than 50 percent of couples ‘legalized’ via patriarchally religious or androcentrically governmental marriage on 18 December 1976, able to answer that they are the same and always have been since that first day, then why do we do it at all? Hoping to up the percentages of Truth in Promising in some century soon, are we? There’s that hope problem thing again.

I don’t mind folks being together. I’m as much for telling people you love them and enjoying an ecstatic romp in the hay and raising strong, healthy children of reason and spirit and rationality together as the next couple. As the next couple of women and men. Or couple of women. Or couple of men. Just don’t say to me or to each other that it’ll always be so. It won’t always be so. And then, you’ll have lied. When you simply didn’t need to. Here, that hypocrisy problem thing doesn’t have to be. Allah or no god.

And then, the minister also pronounced approvals and favor and blessings down upon (originally, according to this particular patriarchal religion’s canons, … ‘illegitimate’) Zane in the pew off to my left side – his being cuddled there in the matron – in – waiting’s warm arms and now himself just a week away from commencing his fifth month of life. Wearing his lovely little, but manly of course, white christening suit from several weeks back and sporting the yellow elastic – topped booties. I couldn’t find the white ones that specific Saturday morning. Poor, unmatching Z … First portent, perhaps, of an unmatch otherwise, too.

So. For Herod, even though he had promised and promised and vowed and affirmed whatever, First Days meant to him a married morning of every single week finally free at last of me and of the running – around rugrats so that he could be home alone with his Sunday paper, the current Playboy and his right hand.

Wine bottle neck mouths for a lot of men, including Herry, weren’t exciting enough then either. Maybe he was worried about getting his stuck. And now? I don’t know about now. He knew I knew about this hand jive of his though. Wasn’t like his not knowing that I knew of the cows, dogs, pigs and chickens beasties.

And the incest? Like almost all women everywhere are never able to actually possess this ‘kind’ of information, I too had no material proof, no witnesses, a dead ex – mother – in – law and no talking sister – outlaws so Lawyer Jinx said that all of this information wouldn’t help. Even if it had been admissible, I am thinking now, “It didn’t matter. No one in ‘the court’ thinks it matters. These men? Least of all, to these men. These holy, pious, honorable, godly, righteous sons of …. fucked mothers. They will never think it matters; they never have before. Jinx and his own Playboy magazines yelling at me. As I, a mere mama, am attempting to help Zane, for the love of christ, try himself to just be 11 years old! And Jesse 9 and Mirzah 8!”

“A lot of nice people read Playboy, Legion! You shut up about this sex addiction stuff now, ya’ hear!! You’re just exasperating!!!” shouted Jinx right up into my face as he slammed shut his mighty fine office door and me, quite literally by his own two palms shoving both of my shoulders, thumped upside of it.

Only time it would matter is if … I … had done all those things. Sexism: the Original Sin. Flip / Reverse.

If I’d subscribed to Playgirl and helped my sons to sample its tasty morsels of enlightening pornography. If I’d tended to my G – spot and to my clitoris more than to my husband’s penis. If I had tended to my brother Sterling’s penis at all. If I had permitted there to be developed computer – generated whoring ‘business cards’ with my sons’ contact information on them, they serving as their own mama’s pimps and procurers. Even ‘just’ as a ‘joke’. If I had ever been seen to offer an enticing innuendo by way of a sinking neckline one button too many undone. Let alone, had stood fully unclothed in front of a fully lit bedroom window to the blackened urban woods below it or had painted on to me skin – tight denims with crotch crevices strategically placed so as to inform, complete with long curly brown pubes clearly visible through the raggedy cracks, of the no – underpants nuance. If I, as Grace’s girlfriend or at all, had sidled upside, say Lionel, and during his and my mutual egress together from a bottlenecked microbiology lecture hall, had greedily grabbed on to the Portia family’s jewels in one greaseball’s grip of a grope. If I had donned a dripping nightshirt – length tee or a just – out – of – the – shower terry towel to ‘conceal’ my trunkish torso in order to answer a knock at Othello’s infamous front door. If I had taken my children’s father – to – be to a ‘progressively leftist’ antiwar rally – and protest – planning meeting at all, let alone, brought him to one convening at a table within three feet of those working their shifts and plying their trade’s wares at Mr. B’s lap – lubricating, pole – dancing, bare – beavering strip joint on Ames’ Main Street. If I, at any time, had stuffed anything up my husband’s ass. If I had driven – anywhere – Herry’s newborn and that wee one’s two – year – old bro tanked up within my beery belly on my most recent consumption of an entire six pack. If I had managed – by way of sorcery and magical hexing incantations now – say, a throat – throttling chokehold to bring down Herry enough in order to get him kneed in the breastbone and threaten his facial features with my fists or sling him over my left shoulder like so much bagged waste, pitch him off of it then onto the homeland’s front stoop and, from his entire watching family, lock him out of his homeland for two full days’ and two full nights’ worth. If I had not known both their first and last names and addresses, let alone, all of their credentials of all of the Boys’ babysitters when I traveled for work. If I had traveled for work at all! If I had, while traveling, ‘comforted’ anyone else while away from husband, hearth and home. If I had perjured myself by way of sworn court documents ballyhooing and flaunting graduate college degrees which I had never earned nor been granted and decades’ worth of sobriety from alcohol or by lying about nearly everything else. If I had purchased without espouso’s input and approval because I considered myself some gigola’s brand of especial espousa who did not have to respect, let alone, honor his mutuality and support, two airplanes and two homeland houses. If I had slept right through a veterinary call to a dairyman’s cow maybe not yet unconscious but quite down and certainly well on her way to that state because of the paralysis to her obturator nerve by way of milk fever occurring soon after calving. Another one of the Earth’s babes in absolute need of its mama. In need of its mama alive and … there. If I had allowed, well, not even bothered to do the work of knowing in the first place that Teenagers Zane and Jesse had headed off for fishing parts unknown of, say, Spruce Knob Lake or that one or both of them intended to stand 20 feet up a treeside but I – and no one else either – had no knowledge of where that hunting was taking place nor of the Boys’ intended itinerary in the Monongahela Forest, let alone, their expected time of arrival back at my homeland.