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Deep River: The Little League Years

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joneshowell@yahoo.com ,  817.247-2215 cell

Biographical novel

by Jones Lamar Howell

Young Jones has just watched his mother die, and when his rebellious sister Caroline takes control of the household in place of the troubled father, the family begins to disintegrate. Jones finds meaning for his life through his new passion for Little League baseball, his odd friendships in the small town, and his somewhat mystical link to nearby Deep River.

Besides his respectable classmate Mark, Jones befriends Buford the simpleton, and the future-criminal Donnie. He also has dealings with some of the quirky townspeople, such as Donut the town drunk and his sissy brother Calvin, and the blue-haired street evangelist Sister Shaw.

When Dick Clark and Merle Haggard come to make a movie about bootlegging during the Depression – with Deep River in the setting – Jones finds time apart from baseball to learn about the history of Ramseur and to observe its citizens’ uproarious attempts at fame.

Besides being a place for adventure, the river becomes a retreat from family conflicts, especially after Jones sights an enormous osprey there. When the bird appears in his dreams he sees this as a sign of destiny. He feels conflicted, however, because in his dreams the bird is always in danger.

The family is not short on troubles when Stacy the Worm calls on Caroline. A love triangle in the movie oddly parallels what Jones sees happening in his own family. Jones despises Caroline’s behavior and her mistreatment of their weak-minded sister Jeanette, but is too timid to stand up to her. When a paralyzing illness strikes Caroline, long-buried sentiments about their mother’s death come to the surface, with talk of Caroline being under a curse.

Between visits with family – and sometimes the hated Stacy – to see Caroline in the hospital at far-away Chapel Hill, Jones continues to gain confidence through baseball. He experiences the highlight of his two years against the number one team in the league. He faces nineteen batters, striking out fourteen, and gets sweet revenge on those who mock his team. When he comes home with the exciting news, he is met by his drunken, enraged father who strikes him in the back with a shoe.  The next month Jones makes the all-star team, but their only game is anti-climactic and becomes a blur in his memory, the bruise in the middle of his back signaling a meaningless end to baseball.

Months after both baseball and the filming ends, Jones goes with his neighbors to a drive-in theater to bask in the glory of their very own movie, Killers Three. In the final scene of the movie, all the townspeople, even the weird ones, are seen huddling together as the audience for a fake Merle Haggard concert.

On Christmas Eve the town has a special meeting to recognize all who participated in the making of the film and to announce the re-opening of Ramseur’s refurbished theater. Jones attends the meeting and afterwards walks back home across Deep River. It begins to snow, and in the downy quiet, four days after his thirteenth birthday, Jones finds peace and a quiet understanding that his destiny will take him away from this town, and from the river that helped shape his life.

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I asked

why I always try to reach the unreachable

He answered me

and the answer is always

Peace

And peace is enough

Peace is better than a show of power – it’s wisdom

Peace is fresher than a morning shower – it’s securing

More enduring than affirmation or denial

It’s the simple meal before the deathly trial

Peace precludes the bitter herbs of regret

the officious shadows of debt

Peace is not the river, it’s the river still

Peace is not the night

it’s the closing cloak of dark quiet

not the trailing off of sound

but the weighty crown and company

of silence.

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I raise the white flag to my Conqueror,

then yield to the undertow of his compelling waves of mercy

I oil the rusty hardware of my soul and

brace for the pipewrench of the Master Craftsman;

I place myself between the jaws of the universe’s Nutcracker,

and  jettison the burned-out rockets of self-will and self-reliance;

Finally, I release the smoking brake of my descent down the mountain of control.

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My heart – you broke it, sorta

You started with the aorta

then tugged at the veins and artery

and unplugged the main part of me.

You closed the right ventricle,

choked it tight, then you pulled

and shocked the valves

You shouldn’t have

interrupted the rhythm

and messed with ’em,

rushing from chamber to chamber.

Gosh, the danger!

But . . . that’s romance.

(I’m  not de-fibbing)

We take a chance when

we  give someone our heart.

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This Christmas we will write a page of family history,

but not with paper and pen.

We’ll write it by looping the veins of a bloodline,

curving and crossing and dotting inner living flesh,

etching it with glances into pairs of blues and browns—

at once both tender and genuinely recognizable.

Our ink is the transparent salty elements

escaping roundly and fugitively from those eyes

and forming straight lines, falling, heavy with their own gravity

We’ll write this page with both hands and arms wide open,

holding on for a too-swiftly-passing moment,

then letting go—for fear of clutching

and needing, and letting each other know it—

before our cheeks pink up and flush with embarrassment.

Together we’ll sign off on that document,

with many silent intricately-woven motions of hand-passed dishes,

warm and colorful and care-filled.

Most of all we’ll seal that page with the cracking whispers

we feel escaping from quavering lips,

our hearts catching them before they hit the ground

or slide down the unresponsive wall onto the floor

God forbid that we should lose this page of family history

or place it in an attic of apathy,

a corner of complacency,

or even relegate it to the same dusty fate of common literature.

Rather, we painstakingly tack it invisibly and securely onto our hearts,

or slip it somewhere between Genesis and Revelation:

the very hearth of life

We must put it where it will forever remain,

and pledge to keep on writing

until every touch and word become part of that story

and that history becomes the very substance of eternity

 JLHowell MMXmas

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I can retire in five months
A scary thought I ought not think
But I even dream about it.
What kind of flare or fanfare –
should I dare do something outlandish?
Some offhand humor or dance routine
might doom or diminish my chance
for another career if news got out
that I’d slid down an aircraft emergency shute
with two fresh whipcream-topped frappacinos,
or used the PA system to cuss out my boss
then sweetly tell my comrades “My bad,”
that I had turned from teacher to preacher.
I could use scores of plays on words
To conceal they way I’d call them nerds
or worse, morons or automatons.
Then I would be the renegade tetragrammaton in the movie Equilibrium 
who finally admitted he had emotions
and cried when he heard Beethoven.
Then, on my way to prison I’d laugh at them slovenly plodding
to their intellectual destruction
Nodding as they sign papers they never read and commit mass-logicide,
all the while turning aside to fake a smile,
pouring caffeine down into that machine they traded in their heart for,
telling themselves ‘it’s all for the money’
and ‘it’s a deal ’cause if I die here I won’t feel it.’
Is that the job I’m leaving,
Or my twisted way of perceiving it?
I don’t know, that’s why I writing this.

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THE DESTINY OF AMERICA

1

When scribes of some new century lift up the fateful quill

To record in novel tongues of what good fortune, or grave ill

defined our nation’s tenure as the leader of the world

Of the accolades that followed, or the curses that were hurled

and the meaning of the silence when that final flag unfurled

2

They’ll tell of those who longed to call her cherished borders home

Like ancient generations venerated Greece or Rome.

Or will they sigh of how it rotted like a decadent empire?

Or perchance, the noble nation—in one final blaze of fire,

chose instead to be a martyr among nations, then expire

3

They’ll speak of how two destinies ran strong and parallel

within the country’s psyche, and how both should bode them well

The first great vein was love for God, the other love for gold

like two rivers: one pragmatic, one prophetic—which  foretold

the conflicts in our culture as our narratives unfold

4

They may write of three small clippers, and the isle of Salvador

Sing the praises of Columbus, or his legacy abhor

Will they see the island natives’ thirst for blood at Navidad,

or call the Spaniards murderers in the name of some new god

and the gold prospector mixed with priest as normal, or as odd?

5

They’ll concede the Mayflower Puritans were those who chose to act

with government subordinate to God in said compact.

Or will they vilify the Puritans as too puritanical,

then call the Holy statutes they obeyed tryannical

and citizens who tried to hold to those ideals fanatical?

6

Accounts of English settlements that bore the monarch’s name

such as Jamestown, where the gentry soiled their tender hands in shame

How their charter to make money from the New World was embraced

yet the part to bring the gospel to the savages erased

and belief in national destiny laughed at and effaced

7

They will honor Jonathan Edwards and the Great Awakening,

Allude to Wesley’s hymn O For A Thousand Tongues to Sing

And write of how George Whitefield brought the gospel to the slave.

Or they’ll mock the great revival as sensational and fake

and its  role in revolution simply censure and berate

8

They will pen the great rebellion from the British motherland

As King George damning those Yankees as a renegade young band,

Or they will see the first Americans as patriots and strong

And their independence ire countering despotism’s wrong –

their triumphs and their sacrifices codified in song

9

Will they read the Negro spirituals in the style of Amazing Grace

As the triumph of the spirit of a noble battered race?

Recount the trial of Phyllis Wheatley poems to statesmen of her day

And tell how politicians doubted her to Massachusett’s shame,

Or will they use the cause of slavery to justify or blame?

10

The scholars of the future may regard our Civil War

As a rip within the fabric of the glory that we wore.

Or they’ll paint the American psyche with a dark-pigmented stain

And call the act of state secession pure commercial gain,

Or conclude that thus enslaving our own brothers was insane

11

They’ll pen volumes of the global wars our men were called to fight

Admit that freedom was worth defending, and America did it right

Or they’ll call us ‘ugly Americans’ though all we ever asked

was land enough to bury those who died there in the task

to stop the spread of tyranny and its evil face unmask.

12

They may view this current century as a time of great excess

and it’s people spoiled by government and enslaved by selfishness

Or they will they see the American character that rose from New York dust

And carved on granite mountainsides In Christ Alone We Trust!

and that patriots saved the republic by great sacrifice and guts

13

Each nation has its destiny but some more nobly called

This was our mandate, this our place in time and history’s halls

This was our charge, our sacred duty within two vast and distant shores

We judge ourselves, but our descendants judge us even more

as either those who fought and won, or as those who dropped the torch

14

We solemnly swear and vow by our love for this the United States

That our conscience has been laid bare here, our soul scored and displayed

That we will give our heart, our breath, bone marrow, and our lives

To guard our sacred values so our freedoms can survive,

And leave the scorn or the eulogy for posterity to decide

Epilogue

When the tides of history ebb and flow then sweep the sands away

There remains the fateful hourglass to measure out the day,

to capture in its curv-ed glass some justice roguish grains,

then weigh them in the balance and toss them out again

Onto a stretch of some forgotten beach and countless sands.

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After God made the world, supplied it, got it to spinning at the right speed at just the right distance from the sun, he initiated the population, told them all about himself, enjoyed their company. You know the rest.

They rebelled because of great and justifiable complications, the chief one being pure reckless daring and teenage hormonal bravado. So he had to put some distance between them like any parent would do to an out-of-control child: pad their walls, put on some loud music to drown them out, and generally rock and ignore them till their energy had run out.

After a few generations of wildlife on a pristine planet, the natives pretended God was gone and their children even forgot there was  a God.

So God had a plan: he decided to come down and visit every single  person to show them he was real. He did so at every child’s birth, again when the children reached puberty, on their wedding day, and at other important events, like the moments just before they died. He wanted to be there to hold them in that final passage.

At first, he appeared in a body like the one he had given to the people, so as not to scare them. He introduced himself as God, made gifts appear, warts disappear and other things God-like. But after a few rounds of this, the people started thinking of him as a freak – you know, that old bearded man who never dies. What’s up with him? Didn’t our grandfathers tell us about him? So, they told him not to come interrupt their lives, that he was weirding them out.

Well, God had a second idea: He would come to the people as a spirit with a form, a kind of floating cloud-like humanoid with a voice and a unique translucence. This worked. The people accepted him at first and then they explained him to their children.

“Johnny, this is God the Creator. He loves us and we need to love him and listen to what he says”

At first, he was welcomed, but as time went on his appearing became ordinary and his presence turned rather unimposing. The new people explained him to their children in a matter-of-fact way, like he had always been there, and as far as they knew, he had. Generations went by, with God still hanging around, and humans became more inquisitive about the workings of nature, the origin of thunder, the properties of light, the composition of dirt, etc. These men of learning and their pupils eventually explained everything and kept studying what they did not understand. They began to study the phenomenon of God. They finally figured him out.

Here was their theory: Everyone on earth carries a certain chemically-produced aura about them, and it is mostly invisible. This genetic quality is passed down generationally. But because of the emphasis people put on certain events and passages of life, that aura gets stronger at times and creates an energy field that is visible. People project into that energy field their highest hopes and dreams, their supreme joys and ultimate expressions of destiny, and subconsciously, their ancestral belief systems.  So God became known as an energy field, something like the aurora borealis or a rainbow, and after a while he became such a part of the scenery that he was held in no higher esteem than mist, fog, or even air.

That’s how God failed his GRE.

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CHURCHILL DOWNS DERBY
We have a great track for the race today, and a strong field of competitors..

AND . . . THEY’RE OFF!!

We All Fall Down and Promise Keeper vying for an early lead on the inside, on the outside beside them is Anointing Junkie

Name It Claim is right up there, and Elijah List has some speed on the inside

Fifth place is Every Wind of Doctrine, just ahead of The Prayer of Jabez

Left Behind Series runs along in 7th, Word of Faith and Fasting TV hugging the rails.

Personal Intercessor and Purpose-Driven Life lagging behind on the outside

Forerunner in 11^th

They move into the far turn and

Personal Intercessor is launching from the inside

Dance In The River is firing too

Farther back down on the rail is Laughing Revival

At the back of the pack now beginning to move up is Contemplation Techniques

Seeker Sensitive is also there toward the back

Far behind them all are Sound Doctrine along with Promise Keeper

It’s a tightly packed bunch as they move into the far turn.

It’s still the filly We All Fall Down in front

but on the outside Left Behind Series.

He is the longshot here, jockey Jerry Jenkins asking him for a little bit more.

Every Wind of Doctrine is now 5^th, The Prayer of Jabez 4^th, Word of Faith Coming up on the outside

Dance In the River threads himself through horses

Laughing Revival is beginning to come alive now, he is 7^th on the outside

It’s We All Fall Down and  Name It Claim It

as the field turns for home

At the top of the stretch it’s  We All Fall Down in the lead

Word of Faith is bolting for the lead.

Down toward the inside, coming on through

That is . . . Sound Doctrine!

Has come on to take the lead as they come down to the finish in a spectacular upset

Sound Doctrine has won the 2010 Church Downs Derby!

An impossible event here

And a three-way photo finish for Word of Faith, We All Fall Down, and Name It Claim it. Laughing Revival took fifth.

Sound Doctrine’s jockey has done it again.

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God, I’m not sick-enough of being mediocre

Mildly tired of eating like an ogre

Wee-bit weary of being green and uncouth

Nailing up -isms and warm half-truths

Getting nauseated by drinking swamp water

Berating myself for not thinking what I ought’a.

Lately Lord,

Prayer has been like holding my breath

underwater then I’m gasping,

coming up grateful for nothingness.

It’s the yellow light at an intersection

A pause for light-speed inner reflection

Or a slam on the brakes, then a hesitation.

It’s the rich smell of tobacco drying in a barn

But once smoked, I choke for trying forewarned.

Prayer is coffee beans fresh from the ground

But then comes the roasting and that grinding sound!

It’s the soap bubbles blown with childish glee

Which burst –  pptt!  atmospherically.

One day, though, I’ll hold my breath more,

set up a tent under a semiphore

drink Kopi Luwak coffee and laugh at what’s in it

Then blow soap bubbles a mile a minute.

Give up?

Shrek no!

Amen.

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