My dearest Huntsman
My darling Jo
Dear Jo—
I find myself with pen and finally a bit of unmarked paper, and an almost overwhelming urge to write to you. Of course the urge is not to write to you, no, the urge is to see you, to hear your voice, to speak with you, Joliet, to hold your hand, but instead I am left to take what I might from the shape your name makes in this ink, Jo, Jo, Joliet, Jo.
Jo.
Blast and rot your pride.
Yes, your pride. As if that scrap of qelippa could hurt Me. Me. It ate me away once before, out of the world, you said, yet here I am. I came back. You brought me back. You could have stayed.
You could have stayed.
You should have stayed.
Marfisa is
I beg your
I do not know why I should feel as if I must apologize for or even explain any interruption. It’s not as if you’d sense any hesitation between one line, and the next, or even one word and the next. For you it will all be of a piece when I am done, and this is folded up and sealed away and sent however it is I’ll have it sent to you, and when you open it, and read it, there will not come a moment when you must set it aside and attend the whitterings of your Outlaw as she frets over your use of paper as yet unused, and freely available, but of course now that I’ve gone and written it all down in this letter it can’t help but interrupt, not your reading of it, no, for that is entirely in your hands, of course, to set down and take up again this letter as you like, or need, or to read it straight through in one go, but of the train of my thoughts that I’d meant to set in motion, now sidelined, by Marfisa’s fretting, and then, also, next, by my setting it down, here, in lieu of what I’d thought I’d meant to write. How easily the words flow from this pen. Like ink.
When I do fold this up and seal it away to be sent to you however it might I shall also enclose what is left of your portion of our last turning. I fear it is not the full amount. I have not turned any more since that night, and of course there was little enough left when I had
If you were here I would turn more. It seems unseemly to trawl for someone else to attend me in your stead. Almost as if it would be a betrayal of you. How odd, to feel this way, and yet.
You should have stayed with me, Jo. But not because of that.
That morning, the morning that you left, is it really only two weeks gone? Two weeks, but an ocean of
Why that word? Why did this pen loop its way into ocean just now? It is a vast and a yawning gulf of time, between then, and now, far more it seems in the weight of its passage than two mere weeks, than fourteen
thirteen fifteen
fourteen days, it was a Saturday morning, ninth June, that you left, and today it is Saturday morning, twenty-third June. Fourteen days, even though it was not until late that night, the night of the ninth, that I found out you had gone.
I was in a mood, that day, I admit. I was rash. I should have said something. I should have tried to say anything, but I felt if I were to open my mouth that the sound that I’d make would splinter and shatter everything and everyone around me into a million million pieces. I should have come out to wake you again, to tell you where it was I was going, what it was I decided to do, but even if I had been able to say anything, anything at all but some wordless howl of anger and rage, what would I have said? What could I have said? That I meant to hit them, hurt them, strike where I could, where I might do the most damage to as many of them as
Even writing it down, now, with two weeks to have thought about it, it seems foolish, misguided, silly. Rash. What a mess would I have made had I tried to say something to you, then, in the white-hot endless moment of it all.
But if I had. If I had tried. If I had stammered out to you some scrap of a half-baked not-even plan
Would you still be here?
I’d have to think you would.
That first day, I was only there for a few hours, four or five at the most, barely half the day. I got there early, before anyone else. I dragged over one of the signs they were going to hang on the fencing they’d be putting up, to advertise their venture, so that I’d have somewhere relatively clean and smooth to sit, and there I sat me down, beneath the bridge, between the pillars, almost right where we ended up that one night
right there in sight of perhaps my favorite of the columns, the one with the lions: a single piece, stretched from the base of it up much higher than a watchman could reach. Perhaps he climbed up parked railway cars to work so high. I can imagine him, clinging to a ladder on the side of a boxcar, finishing those tangled branches at the top of the piece, those white overlapping curls and forks set starkly against whatever was used to blacken the concrete. The distant hills, more softly drawn, and the hillocks of river fog, and the differences in texture between the two, how simple, yet how clear. I wonder how he did them. Rubbing with his shirt cuff, perhaps, or his thumb, his fingertips, smudging the chalk with spittle by lamplight, and the steaming trains all a-slumber as he worked. The action, the scene itself, glimpsed through the trunks and branches of the trees in the foreground, a strikingly vertical composition, due, of course, to its canvas: two lions, one at the top, one at the bottom, and between them, the hind, laid out on her back. Not yet savaged, no. He wasn’t interested in drawing anything like that, above and beyond the limitations of his chosen medium. It’s all so stylized, and yet the hind’s distress is quite clear. Her tongue lolls cartoonishly from her mouth. There might as well be a comicstrip bubble above her overturned head. “Lo, I am done for,” it would say.
The top lion, the more active lion, that appears to have brought down the hind, has a mane, a mane that is ridged, like a fingerprint, and his distressingly hand-like paws are poised to grip and rend and tear. The lion beneath, closer to us, rounding on the hind but not yet engaged, has no mane, but her twitching tail testifies as to her interest and investment in the affair. Male, female: it would appear he intended them to be a matched pair? Husband, wife. Mother and father, busily providing for a child-cub somewhere
but I recall you once told me that male lions
is there a term for male lions? They are Kings of the jungle
spending their days, lazing about in the sun, waiting for the females, their Queens, to bring them leftovers from a kill. This King has a black face, that is quite striking
oh but I have used that word already, and for much the same sense. What word might I use instead. I have a thesaurus to hand, her thesaurus, Abby Tinker’s thesaurus, Marfisa’s writer friend, who has died:
marked
pronounced
emphatic
bodacious
screaming
garish
hifalutin
kenspeckle, how is that even a word, kenspeckle, how marvelous. Chiefly Scottish, says the wee parenthetical note here. I am not feeling terribly Scotch, but this King’s black face is quite kenspeckle, though shaped rather more like a badger’s muzzle, or a weasel’s, than a lion’s. Like an illuminating monk, unlike the supine deer, he has drawn something he has never himself seen, but only heard tell of. Tom Stefopoulos, that was his name. Tom Stefopoulos transposed these majestic hunters, dimly glimpsed, from a sunbaked savannah to a scene rather more Oregonial, those distant hills, the river fog, the tangled trees.
And they look at this, at all of it, and all the others besides, and they would tear it down, each and every one. It’s in their way. That’s all they can see.
I need you to come back, Jo. I need your help to save it all.
I have to imagine you’ve gone back to where you’re from. You’ve never really said much about where that was at all. You have a mother you do not wish to speak with, which is something we have always had in common. You’ve never mentioned your father at all that I can remember, or a brother, or a sister. I know you come from somewhere to the West of here, and there’s very little left to the West, and most of that lies along the coast, and so when I think of you now that you are gone I think of
and of course that’s where the word ocean came from. That’s why it fell from the pen. I think of you standing on a rise, looking out over endless blue water beneath a cloudless blue sky, but of course the ocean isn’t between us, it’s before us. It’s not the time between then and now. It’s some other time entirely. It’s what’s to come. When I think of you now, in what I think to be your home, I’m somewhere behind you, following after. I can’t see your face. I can’t tell if you’re happy, or sad, relieved, or aggrieved, or angry, I just don’t know.
But when I think of you, reading this letter, of where you will be when it is delivered to you, I see you, oddly enough, under a tree. I could not say what kind of tree. Perhaps an oak. Do oaks grow by the ocean, here?
I suppose there are enough small towns in the hills between here, and there, that you might well have grown up in. There must be an oak somewhere in all that space for you to sit beneath.
Jo
Joliet
my Huntsman, my Hawk
my one true only
my love
come back
