Jul 272011
 

Photo by Emmanuel Albert

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In this amazing story, Mark Anthony Jarman tells the tale of Custer’s Last Stand in a way it’s never been told before–surreal, phantasmagoric, funny and horrid all at once. I put this story in Best Canadian Stories when I was editor of that estimable annual collection. And you can also find it in his collection My White Planet. 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). Mark has written a book of poetry, Killing the Swan, a hockey novel, Salvage King Ya!, four story collections, Dancing Nightly in the Tavern, New Orleans is Sinking, 19 Knives, and My White Planet, and nonfiction book about Ireland called Ireland’s Eye. He teaches at the University of New Brunswick and lives in a very large house fronting the Saint John River. His story “The December Astronauts (or Moonbase Horse Code)” appears in Numéro Cinq’s Best of Vol. 1. See also his interview with NC Contributor Mary Stein here.

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Winter Coat, Winter Count (Assiniboia Death Trip)

By Mark Anthony Jarman

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Each man is fain to pluck his means, as it were, out of his neighbour’s throat.

—Mourt’s Relation: A Journal of the Pilgrims at Plymouth

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She buttons up her tiny sweater, not knowing I study her.  She is vanishing like a bridge in fog.  Crow Jane is not a ghost, but I know now she will haunt me.  I want to see her unbutton the same garment for me.  Nothing stays the same in fashions.

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The bridge vanishes in fog and I discover we are fretful devices wrapped in such thin skin.  Or we are ghosts on river ice.  What’s the difference?  Inside the erect palisades of Fort Robinson Crazy Horse sings his death song; Crazy Horse lies on his red blanket on the floor.  Have you met?

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My good friend Private Gentles runs Crazy Horse through with a bayonet and now ostrich feathers are in vogue on our ladies hats.

To our hats we also add veilings, side combs, pompadour pins.

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Her kind sad face by the icy shore, her long wrists.  Does she have any feelings for me?  I think she does, but I cannot be sure.

Did you see me in the bakery? she asks me.

I thought our paths would cross, she says.

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Louis David Riel swings over the shop’s mannequins.  See the fine glass display cases, our high ceilings of slotted tongue and groove, see the snipers on the high ground, tied into trees like hanged men, and our poor young shop-girl run off her feet.

Hat boxes, invoices. O Miss! O Miss!

The bullet passes my head.  You missed!

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