Chapter Twenty Eight An Opera in Three Acts But with Five Parts
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| as he himself does –– to this day! –– on his own! Fuck! Herry would sooo not have addressed me by any name, let alone, by a titled one in accordance with correct, professionally respectful etiquette!
I answered him, “Dr. Joplin, it’s the Forestry Department. The Forestry Department. You and everyone here, I am certain that every day you’re here, you do … worthy … work. And my degrees? About my education? Dr. Joplin, I use my education … every day.” I don’t know what it was that got me the job. Were they inundated under mountains of work? Had they been strapped and hard – pressed for weeks to months trying to find someone? Was I the first one off the top of the pile and out of the gate? Was I to pay back for all of the trees I’d personally felt accountable for killing over at the junk mail factory? Was Ms. Phillipa Chance’s guiding and generous spirit invisibly orchestrating from an office corner? Or was hiring me only a case of Winter Solstice and seasonal charity? Well, because of –– whatever, thus began … again … for my first time since graduating there, 6½ months’ pregnant with Jesse as I was conferred the doctorate in veterinary medicine, that is, the DVM degree May 1978, a simple relationship with Iowa State University that works today. The start date was set for the Monday morning of 06 January 1992. I could get through the next two weeks without turkey and pie nor certainly any decorated cookies or New Year’s bubbly, for that matter. After all … I, Dr. Legion True, had secured a truly worthy job, only ¾ – time, 9 a.m. to 3 p.m. then and only the nine academic – year months without the summer income at all –– –– but a job, nonetheless, with, again, the promise of permanency! … And since American civil court judges soooo do not count mothering as a job whatsoever at all, then … according to daMan, the first genuine –– paying –– one since Kansas. As I left the Biology Building’s second floor and hurried right back up to the Mall trailer to there finish out the 24th with the United Parcel Service before ending the season and the year of 1991, for that matter, as Save – U – More’s 6 a.m. breakfast cook that upcoming weekend, a holocaustic and terrorizing scene from the Othello Drive’s pornography den returned to my mind’s eye. From that walnut – walled playroom with the walnut, console piano, the space Herry’d said that had, in addition to the gymnasium – sized picture window to the Brookside Forest in its living room, caused him to buy the house from his newest alcoholics anonymous idiot – pal, Cornball –– without my input. Dr. Herod Edinsmaier had brought back to me the Truemaier Boys after first retrieving Mirzah, Jesse and Zane from their weekend at AmTaham’s and Mehitable’s. It was a Sunday evening, 02 October 1988; and strapped within their seatbelts and, thus, captured and inescapably imprisoned in this way on Interstate – 80 while traveling back, Still – Husband Herry, alone, had told the Boys that he was divorcing me –– and before telling me he was divorcing me! Inside that den, then, he proceeded to –– while the Boys witnessed from their hallway glances through its doorframe. Horrid Herry blathered forth with yet another … exhibition. Still – Husband Herry picked up an object that just happened to be sitting on the top – down, built – in escritoire, a stainless steel teaspoon which had been left lying there by who knows who. Herry held it between his thumb and left index finger and, with the last three fingers slightly crooked, began swinging the spoon back and forth, back and forth, back and forth, it swaying in front of my eyes in that procedural – like hypnotizing pendulum mode as The Sperm Donor of MY three Truemaier Boys sneered at me, “I don’t have my ‘doctor – doctor wife’ any more, my ornament to dangle in front of my family and friends. You’re nothing now. You’re nothin’ but a regular, old housewife now. You’re nothing.” This … from the good and wonderful man who was later to tell several different judges several different times how it was that he, even at this point in his life, had had ten years of alcoholics anonymous ‘recovery’! This … from the man who was later to tell several different judges several different times how it was that he, at the time he married Ms. Fannie Issicran McLive on 02 June 1990, a most incredible shrew and even more like Mehitable than I could’ve ever imagined possible in another, that he, at the point when he married her, had had 13 years of alcoholics anonymous ‘recovery’! This? From a ‘recovering’, much less, ‘recovered’ … man? From one who still did not speak my name ––not even to tell me that he was divorcing the “nothing,” the “regular, old housewife” … behind that name!
What would this ‘recovered’ man, admittedly snide and licentiously elitist, who had not only completely hidden my children from their mother but had also spirited them halfway away across the nation into an aristocratic milquetoast’s and his termagant’s territory think about one Legion True, BSN, DVM, PhD and present Deli Grill Queen – Secretary? Never one to have been a human doing instead of a DEhuman being, it will take far, far more than a spoon, Herry’s sneering and those standard snide remarks of his in front of my babies to humiliate me now. Detail – and precision – oriented person that I am, I was thrilled –– and proud –– to be worthily working for the University; and since from my Latin of previous years’ education I already knew the root of the occupation and its title, I just knew then, too, that I’d make one helluva damn mighty fine, secret – keeping secretary.
This ‘recovered’ man’s slung – at – me snidery? Classically, such … says a colossally passel more about Swill – Spewing Herry than it will ever accurately describe any of The Sexist Pig’s cuntable liaisons, much less me, Dr. Legion True, Secretary! Some 1991 year it had been. Fabulous finale that finding both the Boys and the Forestry secretariat position almost back – to – back was, and this fortune most assuredly was fantastic, one matter had not ended that November and December well. As soon as I knew where the Boys were –– central West Virginia –– a small port there called Grubtrop of less than 7,000 persons which was contiguous with one of 24,000 … at where a medical center was located, Montclank, I telephoned the cops there and its community’s public school officials. I wanted, of course, to secure for the Boys by long – distance as much safety as I could possibly manage; but either Herry or Ms. Fannie Issicran McLive or, more likely the both of them together just a – folie – à – deuxing yet again! had already covered those two distinct bases in that town. And thoroughly! I wasn’t even accorded the time of day by anyone at either outfit. Even receptionists and clerical workers, not to mention teachers, school counselors and detectives as well as the principals and its fuzz’s chief –– all echelons all the way up and down –– again already knew who I was when first I called. And they were not on the telephone anyhow, to say the very least, at all … cordial. Kinda like how far toooo, too many persons frostily (ab)use impersonal emailing of their basest sentiments … now. Pillared Edinsmaier, a doctor after all, had just graced their community with his moving – in presence; and all of its locals were apparently fawning and falling all over themselves to make him and his little, stay – at – home, possibly homeschooling missus just as welcome as possible –– even if that meant dissin’, on his behalf of course, the certainly – now – so – pointless – and – most – redundant ex – missus. Ms. McLive, after all and witnessed there in Herry’s Own Opprobrious Eight Pages, had cuntingly cooed during Herry’s ‘courtship of sorts’ how it was that she could “work at McDonald’s and she didn’t care where.” And the lawmen and this port’s school personnel? Smack in line they were. Androcentrically, these folks all lined right up, one by one there in central West Virginia, too, to carry out the sexist backlash for daMan –– the one with which Rachel and I and all of us other Mothers on Trial are always everywhere … so smashingly clobbered.
Mirzah Truemaier enrolled in one of the two Grubtrop elementaries which, in physical space, was approximately a mile or more from the middle and high schools, both of those buildings and sports fields, side by side. That is, a mile or more away every day from his brothers, too, of course. The police station was situated on the far northwest side of town next to a mixmaster – like infrastructure which was the confluence of two major intersecting interstates; and from the Edinsmaier – McLive residence or either school complexes not at all easily accessible by a child walking there. If need be. Mehitable, right away, sent me a newspaper clipping about how six out of every 10 males in the entire state of West Virginia, from his age of 10 years old or older chewed tobacco –– 60 percent of its young boys and men. This did not surprise me. In fact, nothing about the state from its public schools’ quality and conditions to the vast extent of its handgun ownership to its feverish, snake – handling religiosity – fervor to its US Senator Byrd – antics shocked me. Nor, now either, … with its present – day leader: Governor Robert Wise recently stated to the New York Times that he wholeheartedly believes in “accountability” but also knows that “forgiveness” has “to be earned” –– in light of his lately revealed “unfaithfulness” to his family … infidelity by way of flying off with the overseer of the European operations for West Virginia’s Development Office, a woman not his wife with whom he flung a bit about Spain and whose estranged husband outed her. And subsequently too, that state’s Chief, the man whose office states that not only has the governor no intention of resigning but also that it is certain that none of his little adventures will affect Mr. Wise’s chance for re – election! How wise was Wise? Don’t know yet. Guess we’ll all find out, huh?
No surprise, though. Only saddened and disappointed me soooo –– to finally learn where Jesse, Mirzah and Zane actually were. “Poverty with a view,” Octogenarian Frieda Chicken Guthrie outright branded West Virginia when she, too, found out my Truemaier Boys’ probable whereabouts. This man who had “sworn an oath” to Judge Sol Wacotler Seizor … “legally promising” him … JYeeaah!!! … that my three Boys would conclude their elementary and secondary educations in Ames, Iowa, the school system ranked that Act I year of 1989, and at least the next four consecutive years, which included then Acts Two and Three, as number nine among all of the community school systems within the entire nation had just taken them all to a state –– considering the positives and negatives of the overall conditions and categories (such as education, economics, safety, employment and community opportunity, housing, climate and environment, transportation and health) –– that fuckingly ranked down in the frickin’, flushing toilet! Today West Virginia is 49th of the 50 states in quality of folks’ health, freedom from crime and persons’ overall general livability –– one of the least livable states and second only to Mississippi, that is. In 1991, it could not have been in the top ten even –– which is where Iowa was; and in the first couple years of the newest millennium, Iowa ranked #2 in livability on most ratings’ indices and second only to Minnesota … next door to the north! The Ames Public Library? Our sweet APL ranked in the year 2000, as number nine among the country’s best community libraries. Just in the quality and taste of its drinking water alone? Ames frequently ranks as #1 in the entire state and within the top ten in national competitions overall!
The worst of it though? This was …this is … common knowledge! Folks knew this going in –– it wasn’t like it came as a major astonishment nor even as a minor unknown to Dr. Herod Edinsmaier; he knew all along what it was that he was doing with West Virginia and how he was playing so dirtily with all of … my Boys’ brains. He was hiding Zane, Jesse and Mirzah from me while, at the same time, sacrificing the wonderment they’d already had with me –– and, most assuredly, … purposefully and perfectly punishing us all. Rabid … lethal … revenge. * * * * Only a couple of months into the Forestry position a handful of professors came to me and asked if I might want more hours’ work –– which was awesome! Their department was, in a year and a half’s time hence, to play host to 400 of the World’s finest agroforesters. An international conference was coming into town; and for its preparation then, the faculty needed an individual contact person and coordinator inside the department proper to start to work now, ahead of time, alongside the University’s overall, general conferencing service which performed the more universal coordinating endeavors. Again I was thrilled –– and took to it immediately –– including evenings and some several, late Saturday afternoons, after first finishing my delicatessen shift. A nicer, more spiritually elevated group of persons to ever walk the natural World over … I have yet to meet and know. I truly, truly missed my Boys, which of course I believed was to Deviant Herry’s delight. All of one’s ordinary human emotions and any of those of DEhumans for damned sure, so ‘outlandishly irrelevant’ and purposefully alien to this man, I know that my yearning for my Children … hourly … utterly pleased the socially pathologic pathologist. But I threw myself into this job and into these people and learned again to smile once in a great, long while. While blue jeans and the loveliest of simple, gray heather departmental sweatshirts was more than acceptable apparel, from time to time I actually languished in hosiery and high heels –– just for a vintage, retro genre of secretarial attiring adventure! I also enjoyed the other persons of the position –– the college students themselves, that is, the forestry majors emphasizing in their four – year degree programs either sustainable agricultural practices or all of the knowledge surrounding human beings’ use of products made from or involving anything … wooden! I was the “undergraduate advising secretary,” my official title, so those folks are whom I was privileged to mostly serve! The undergrads and their forestry professors. Once in awhile some graduate students as well –– although another superb individual handled their secretarial matters. As much as an episode of yearning cut so deeply, a couple of first –, second – or third – year students would come by my workstation and need help with the planning of their annually flung Wild Game and Honors Banquet or with how to fund each one of their summer requirements consisting of eight weeks’ Forestry Camp up north or out west to administering the department’s fine arts contest which I continuously oversaw so that students could win tickets on an event – to – event basis and actually attend then, free of charge to the student, local performances and concerts! (with grateful thanks to a very, very generous retired program benefactor and donating sponsor!) to worrying with them all about their upcoming midterm examinations. To –– as well –– the spring semesters’ midterm breaks when two of the undergraduates in particular spent those entire weeks annually all of the years of their educations not vacationing anywhere at all but, instead, hard at work in Ames filling out scholarship and grant applications with my help so as to secure for themselves their own funding sources for the next upcoming fall terms since these two women’s parents just didn’t have it for either one of them! And … as far as my own education –– as far as about that which Forestry Department Head Joplin had, at the very first, asked me? –––– Well, with regard to life’s lessons, the ones a willing person learns when teachable … when she or he isn’t all of the time talking, talking, “teaching” – talking but is, instead, actually listening to others! … as well as with regard to my knowledge taken in from all of my formal, higher degrees –– the ones behind diplomas which I actually earned and never make up lies about or fuckingly fake on any résumés’ biographical sketches … as does, still, the Wonderfully – Good – at – Lying Dr. Edinsmaier? I was, indeed, using … my own education… every day. I used it every single day all right … that is, up until one Monday morning –– the most common day of any week for middle – aged to elderly males to suffer heart attacks and die –– when my telephone rang around 6:40 am on Havencourt just as I shuffled out of the shower still not terrifically refreshed for my upcoming work week. It had been a particularly trying weekend actually, and I was not quite recovered from it –– yet had a hefty schedule facing me but, really, nothing more than the usual. In order to live and to keep current on all of the in – full, on – time child support payments, that usual then meant weekday daytimes at the Forestry Department, two evenings per week and both Saturdays and Sundays every single weekend at the 6 am – to – 2 pm delicatessen grill of the Save – U – More grocery store –– except … for this very past weekend. I had finally asked for the 28th and the 29th of March entirely off from the weekend deli work because of a special errand I wanted to run … one down in Des Moines , which AmTaham had requested of me actually. The Mercy Hospital’s continuing education complex there staged a two – day regional conference and workshop on post – polio syndrome, that which had plagued my father also since his days of poliomyelitis paralysis and those of when Great – Grandma Tessa Lorraine had managed, struggling nearly alone with – then – no way to know if what she was doing would actually work to heal him, to salvage his entire life. She administered the two years’ worth of function – saving physical therapy to her stricken 19 – year – old child and, thusly, the then – forced college dropout, AmTaham. AmTaham himself could not attend the medical center’s event and wondered if I could go –– in order to learn on his behalf and, then, to report back to him. I did both. I went and I reported back. Late that Sunday afternoon of 29 March –– along around 5:00 p.m. or so. We exchanged a lovely discussion on the telephone, he and I, since the conference, while exhausting, was quite amazing and soooo, so eye – opening; and I had had a profusive glut of information to tell him. AmTaham began the conversation, our last, by thanking me for doing this for him and then shocking the beYesus out of me with the fact that while I was driving to Des Moines he’d been insuring his latest Caddy, another Blue not even a couple of years old yet, a Sedan DeVille, and that if I wanted it when he was done with it, his having only just purchased and brought it home to Williamsburg from Iowa City “the day before yesterday,” why, simply to let him know that! That said then! well, the conference and what I now knew from my having participated in it took up the remaining bulk of our chat. I remember telling him that I had never seen so much metallic evidence inside one room before –– of human beings permanently brought low and almost entirely all the way down by a microbe … as I had seen that specific 1992 Saturday afternoon in Des Moines . Braces and wheelchairs and crutches and wilted and withered, literally fucked forms all over that place. AmTaham and a mama named Tessa Lorraine had simply done wonders back in 1939, back when there were no chemicals to prevent, let alone, to cure! My daddy, while afflicted somewhat had certainly not been cursed, life – long, as had so many, many of these other Iowans.
The person on the telephone early on the very next morning –– this particular Monday then –– was my older sister, Ardys, calling me from her home in east central Michigan to say that she herself had just hung up the phone receiver with our mother, Mehitable. At 6:15 to 6:20 a.m., approximately 25 minutes’ time earlier and apparently … a lifetime’s length of measurement, it seems Mehitable had dialed 911 because she, alone and reading the day’s Gazette in their Williamsburg living room at the time, had heard a massive crashing noise coming to her ears from the main – level bathroom. Ardys said that Mehitable had told her that our father, AmTaham, appeared to Mehitable to be dead. “Wha’? What?! So you’re saying what exactly here, Ardys?!” “Well now, I don’t quite know, I guess,” my eldest sibling, at the time then herself 47, had never been one to get from others facts and details coming at her pinned down … fast. She would have made, I am thinking now, just a horrid secretary. “Is Daddy dead, Ardys?! ! ! Ardys, what do you know?! ! !” “Well now, that’s what it sounds like Mother was trying to tell me, doesn’t it?!” “How the !^*#&$@^$#&*&#! should I know! I’m hanging up and calling Wyman!” Shit! I loathed her dithering, same as I hated Mehitable’s! And I did exactly that, “Wyman. It’s Legion. Say, Wyman, I, ah, um, I just received the strangest call from Ardys. From Michigan . She said Mehitable just called her, but between the two of them, they apparently don’t know if AmTaham’s suffered a heart attack and is or is not dead from it! It’s 6:45 right now. Can you please rush over there and check on things, Wyman? Dad and Mom’s line keeps coming back busy!” Interminable it seemed but truly was only 15 minutes or less before Cousin Wyman telephoned me back. He must’ve flown over to the very west edge of town which, for him at the time, only meant about a mile by car but through several stop signs and block intersections in the Burg. His uncle, he told me, was, indeed, dead. “It’s true, Legion. He’s gone. AmTaham is dead.” “O, m’god! ! ! O, m’god, O, m’god, O, m’god! ! !” I slumped over and dropped the receiver to my one hearing ear on the brown table in the Havencourt condominium’s kitchen in the darkness of the early morning and without its lamps on yet. This news came to me … 44¼ years old. Same birthday as AmTaham’s –– but the two of us now separated. Separated forever. And I was … all alone. All alone. All alone. “Yeah.” It could’ve been a couple of minutes, a hundred seconds or so. Then I spoke again, still not weeping, “Aaah, ah, Wyman?” “Yeah.” “I, um, I have to call some people. And, ah, um, … ah, get on the road then. Actually, no. No. Come to think on it some, Wyman, I bet … I bet I have to go over to the courthouse in Nevada first and, ah, … ah, talk to a judge about the Boys. About permission, ya’ know. About the judge’s letting the Boys come back here from West Virginia. Or … or not. Ah. Where can I call you back later?” We all didn’t have cell phones then yet so arrangements were made for me to catch Wyman in a couple of hours’ time at his home. Life – long? How long is that? … Just how long is life – long? From my last hearing AmTaham, life – long meant less than a full day. Barely more than a half day actually, not even 14 hours. From Sunday afternoon a bit after 5 p.m. until 6:45 – 7:00 a.m. the very next morning. And post – polio? It had killed him, I am thinking. The heart, the cardiac muscle … shot, the result of polio’s viral destruction.
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