Mark Anthony Jarman
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Ladybug, ladybug, fly away home
Your house is on fire, your children all alone
OUR CASKETS LAND at Dover Air Force Base draped in flags; the boys fly home, the rookie drivers who were trapped in the roadside ambush, in the incendiary daisy chain. We tried to add hillbilly armour to the suicide wagons, but it didn’t help. All night the planes with the wounded lift off to the surgeons in Germany and I finally fall asleep to find my mother and father smiling in their sunlit yard, my childhood yard, but rising high above their garden is a murky medieval fortress on a broad hill. On the rampart walls are the silhouettes of bearded warriors in their distinctive headgear, on high paths tribal fighters in pie-crust hats walk with bulbous rockets hoisted on their shoulders – RPGs – carrying the weight of the rockets casually, the way a school-kid carries a baseball bat.
In their sunny yard I hold up a .22 rifle, pose for a photo like Lee Harvey Oswald, my childhood rifle, a gun that was later stolen from my car and used in a drugstore robbery that time my vintage coupe was in for repairs at the Green T Texaco and Lloyd the mechanic forgot to lock my car.
I hold the familiar rifle in my hands, open the oiled bolt, slide a tiny brass shell into the chamber, close the bolt, and I aim the sleek rifle up the hill at the outline of a distant head on the ramparts. I breathe out, squeeze the trigger slowly, and the human outline recoils from the blow. I have hit a man up on the medieval wall. Someone shouts and men start down the hillside paths. My mother and father smile and relax in the suburban sun, chatting in Adirondack chairs, seemingly unaware of my rifle’s report and the hajji hornet buzz I’ve drawn upon their heads, the scores of bearded men trotting down paths, robes picking up burrs in the long yellow grass.
I leave my parents, run under the elms to the railroad station, though I’ve never noticed this brick station before. On the iron platforms are more scared reservists – not even real soldiers. Some rummage in their gear, try on gas masks and night goggles, as if that might help them see where they are going next. I mingle in the great crowd and my father sits in his green and sunny yard in dark glasses and a yellow golf shirt, an exile some distance from his birth, but with his garden chair and daisies (she loves me, she loves me not) and honeysuckle hedge he looks very English and very happy with my mother and his life. My parents don’t mind fading away, they forgive me, they seem all right with what is coming for them in the sunlight.
—Mark Anthony Jarman
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Mark Anthony Jarman is a short story writer without peer, heir to a skein of pyrotechnic rhetoric that comes from Joyce and Faulkner and fuels the writing, today, of people like Cormac McCarthy and the late Barry Hannah. He edits fiction for a venerable Canadian magazine called The Fiddlehead which, in the 1970s, published some of my first short stories (and another story is coming out in the summer, 2011, issue). Jarman has written a book of poetry, Killing the Swan, a hockey novel, Salvage King Ya!, five story collections, including Dancing Nightly in the Tavern, New Orleans is Sinking, 19 Knives, and My White Planet, and nonfiction book about Ireland called Ireland’s Eye. His latest collection, Knife Party at the Hotel Europa (Goose Lane Editions, 2015), is reviewed in this issue of NC.