conifer hearts 4

        What could he find in the footlocker? Artie wanted to share something with his newest Third-grader. But what?
        There were books. Two his father had given him. Artie was about to depart for India and his father thought they would be somehow instructive as well as entertaining. Talbot Mundy's "King of the Khyber Rifles" and Louis Bromfield's "The Rains Came." Zev Hoffman had enjoyed them long ago. Maybe his son would also.
        Artie pictured his father reading by lamplight after closing the tailor shop. Escaping into fabled lands far, far away. Transported from the sooty brownstone life in the Lower East Side.
        "Thanks, Pop."
        He never read them.
        The footlocker contained a trove of wisdom books. Rumi and Kabir. The Vedas and Bhagavad Gita. D.T. Zuzuki on Zen and an odd little work by Paul Reps, "Zen Flesh, Zen Bones." There was Momma Hoffman's Tanakh.
        Eureka!
        There was his boyhood Duncan championship yo-yo, its edges chafed down to bare wood from "walking the dog." He stuffed it into his jeans, feeling a parable taking bloom in his head.


                                                                                      *


        He found her practicing his Tai Chi on the downy turf of the Emerald Lea. Sleeves of her oversized Hawaiian shirt flapped like the wings of a ruptured box-kite. Breasts jiggled within the loose tube top. The elasticity of her gym shorts had been laundered to death. They would not stay up.
        That was how he saw the scars.
        Cords of raised white flesh stretched across her lower back. Artie was certain she had been flogged.
        As in Cat O' Nine Tails.
        God damn Alabama!
        "Namaste, Kelly."
        "Mister Artie!" She paused in her dance of winds. "How'm I doing?"
        "How do you think you are doing?"
        "Not so good."
        "It may be that you have not found your true center."
        "Where is it?"
        He placed the palm of his hand upon her belly. The node of her navel found his life line. He replied, "Somewhere within you."
        Coquettishly: "I favor a man with a slow dry hand."
        Immediately he thought, I'll reserve the yo-yo for someone else.


                                                                                            *


        In the late afternoon of the same day he sat with her beneath a Douglas fir. He had spread a bluebonnet tablecloth, and there were books and a bottle of Boone's Farm. Two silhouettes wrapped in the sun's ochre glow, they listened in silence to the gurgling of a rill that nosed down from the forest.
        And he asked her if she believed in the enchantment of things.
        After a long time she replied, "Sometimes things touch me in the spirit."
        "Such as?"
        "Oh, beautiful things. Like all this." She gestured with an all-encompassing wave of the hand.
        "I feel the same way, Kelly."
        In a raspy low voice she said, "Sometimes things afflict me in the spirit as well. Demons in the dark. When I'm not sure of things."
        "Do you have medicine?"
        "I have Lord Jesus."