Certain stories demand a reckoning.

After the bard Orpheus abandoned the precincts of the underworld, having failed in his lover’s quest to rescue Eurydice, his bride, he wandered disconsolate for several years until, collecting his grief, he found a bare green hilltop and began again, as was his talent, to play and sing — a strange, new music, “different but harmonious,” no longer poised to captivate the kingdom of the dead, or celebrate Jove, the mighty Thunderer, but rather, as Orpheus himself declared aloud:

                              ...the occasion seeks
A gentler lyre, for I would sing of boys
Loved by the gods, and girls inflamed by love
To things forbidden...

While he sang, all Nature moved to listen — the trees brought shade; the birds gave wing; serpents gathered at his feet. His song begat remembrance, grief for lost times before the love or cruelty of the gods set in motion violent and unending metamorphosis, “of bodies changed / to different forms,” trading frail human flesh for bark or rock, fang or talon.

North of El Reno, Oklahoma, beyond the lights of the Lucky Star Casino, are the ruins of the Concho Indian Boarding School, an uncustomary shrine magnifying a new American frontier as yet unborn. Originally built to serve the Cheyenne and Arapaho tribes of western Oklahoma, for nearly three-quarters of a century, until its closure in the early 1980s, the school educated Indian children from at least twelve states and twenty different tribes, part of an ill-advised and disquieting progressive social experiment in the transformation of human personality.

At the close of the nineteenth century, the United States Government found itself at last with absolute dominion over the Native peoples of the interior, whom the Supreme Court had ruled were “domestic, dependent nations,” sovereign but helpless, and now reliant on Washington for any and all material comfort. “They all have to be killed,” one Army general explained, “or maintained as a species of pauper.” Faced ultimately with the latter outcome, the federal government, in league with reform-minded citizens, pursued a desultory policy forcing the rudiments of civilization on the recently subjugated, in manner and means often openly coercive:

“The condition of these tribes is unique, in that they are the first of the blanket Indians to take allotments and assume the role of citizenship and as neighbors to the whites resident among them. All of a sudden they have been subjected to a complete metamorphosis in their environment; and while but yesterday they roamed unhindered over their broad possessions, to day [sic] they find themselves shut in by circumscribed limits, subject to the white man’s laws…

“During the progress of the recent annuity payment I have used the opportunity to urge upon each head of a family having children of school age the importance of sending their children to school. In this way I have succeeded in obtaining a number of scholars that would otherwise have not been sent to school. In some cases it was necessary to refuse payment to guardians of minor children in order to exact a promise that they would place the child in school. In only one instance have I met with a positive refusal to do so, and in this I ordered the rations of the family cut off. It requires hard work to induce many of them to consent, but I have kept at work, and by persuasion and promises of kind treatment of their children I hope to get the greater part of the children in school.”

Colonel Richard Henry Pratt, the progressive technocrat chiefly responsible for the network of over 400 boarding schools created for the compulsory education of Native children, saw his work as a mercy, a genuine effort to change direction away from longstanding government policies of tribal relocation and extermination:

“Get the new nickel and look at the face of the Indian, and see just in front of his eyes the one great American word, ‘Liberty.’ Consider, read, investigate, get to the bottom of his case, and show me, if you can — where in all the history of our dealings with the Indian, we have given him liberty and any material right help to fully develop into real civilized manhood and independent citizenship.”

“A great general has said that the only good Indian is a dead one... In a sense, I agree with the sentiment, but only in this: that all the Indian there is in the race should be dead. Kill the Indian in him, and save the man.”

Students were forced to cut their hair, speak English, and wear European clothes. Pratt even arranged before and after photo shoots, documenting their betterment from savagery for bureaucrats and wealthy donors. The progress was slow: “There is no selfishness [in them],” one reformer lamented, “which is at the bottom of civilization.” Children often returned to their families alienated and confused, stranded without recourse between two conflicting worlds.

“I do not know why God made the Indian and the white man different,” remarked an Arapaho chief on Easter Sunday 1893, “but I am glad we shall share alike in the resurrection.”

In May 1939, the Associated Press reported on a visit — for readers as far flung as Kokomo, Indiana and Ukiah, California — by a delegation of Concho Indian Boarding School students to the nearby city of Clinton, Oklahoma:

“A large audience had assembled at the high school auditorium to hear a program by a group of Concho Indian school pupils. Outside the building, a hot sun was shining on drought-stricken crop lands. Suddenly, Roland Sundown, an instructor of the Indian school, began to sing the weird, imploring rain song of the Navajo medicine man — the song once used as a prayer for drought relief… Scarcely had the last strains of the chant died away when the audience became aware of rain drops pattering on the roof. A brisk shower — Clinton’s first in almost a month — was falling.”

“Every so often such dispatches appear in the news,” the account concluded, “strange quirks of fate that are a challenge to man’s thought and reasoning.”

Roland Sundown was a Tonawanda Seneca, a graduate of both Phillips Academy and Dartmouth College. He would go on to teach at the Standing Rock Agency in North Dakota before joining the U.S. Army for service in the Second World War.

That Sundown’s gift to the people of Clinton be characterized by a journalist as a strange quirk of fate is unsurprising. Doubtless the farming families of Clinton saw the exchange quite differently — judging by the hand-drawn placards still scattered throughout the Great Plains, asking prayers for rain, not all peoples of the region have been educated away from their native superstitions.

Many of the Indian boarding schools began to close in the latter decades of the twentieth century. Those that continued on generally changed their manner of education, seeking now to preserve the Native cultural knowledge and language once despised.

When the Bureau of Indian Affairs, for budgetary reasons, chose to close Concho after a final graduating class in May 1982, the community was devastated. “I don’t know where I’ll go next year,” lamented a 14-year-old boy from Red Lake, Minnesota, “If I go to public school my grades will go down. Please keep this school. You took our land and now [you] take our school that we love.”

“A big percentage will not go to school at all,” an instructor noted, “because they’ll tell you they don’t want to become white folks.”

A young Indian girl from Iowa echoed the sentiment: “You’re with your own here. In public schools you have to get used to everybody and their ways.”

Unused, the school fell into disrepair, then ruin. Plans for repurposing the buildings failed to take hold. Beginning in 2014, the Native artist Steven Grounds painted a series of murals at the site, deftly woven throughout the crumbing halls.

Included on an outside wall, facing south, is a rendering of Black Kettle, a Cheyenne chief. In November 1864, while camped peaceably along Sand Creek southeast of Denver, Black Kettle and his mixed band of Cheyenne and Arapaho were overrun by a contingent of U.S. Volunteer Cavalry — commanded by a Methodist pastor, no less —with men, women, and children slaughtered indiscriminately. The dead were mutilated for sport. Women’s genitals were carried away on sticks, and worn as ornaments. Cheyenne scalps were displayed onstage at the Denver Opera House.

“I tell you, Ned,” Captain Silas Soule wrote a friend, “it was hard to see little children on their knees have their brains beat out by men professing to be civilized.” Refusing to fire upon the Indians that day, considering it cold-blooded murder, Soule was later assassinated in Denver, after testifying about the massacre before a military inquiry.

Black Kettle survived the butchery at Sand Creek. But four years later, in November 1868, he and his people were again attacked, falling prey to Lieutenant Colonel George Armstrong Custer and his Seventh Cavalry while camped along the banks of the Washita River in what is now western Oklahoma. “We just went in,” one trooper recalled, “for wiping out the whole gang.” Black Kettle, still an advocate for peace between Indians and whites despite his own frightful experience, was shot in the back while trying to get his wife, Medicine Woman Later, to safety. She died alongside him.

“The American mind,” Henry Adams declared, “stood alone in history for its ignorance of the past.” Considering the full measure of Native suffering in these United States, it’s tempting, even comforting, to discern in the murals of the Concho Indian Boarding School a small victory of sorts, a celebration, a reclamation of the wounded past. Yet regarding any such display in nostalgic isolation, with the Indians presumably “uncompromised by the exercise of power and therefore pure in heart,” is a sentimental mistake, also characteristically American, but no less dangerous even if the steady habit of fools.

The Lucky Star Casino, just down the road from the ruins of the Concho Indian Boarding School, is one of seven gaming locations owned and operated by the Cheyenne and Arapaho Tribes of Oklahoma. Open twenty-four hours a day, and seven days a week, these casinos generate hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue for the tribes each year, with an annual economic impact in northwestern Oklahoma of over half a billion dollars.

In 2025 alone, with 33 tribes operating 138 facilities with Class III gaming throughout the state, gambling in Oklahoma was a $3.64 billion industry.

The WinStar World Casino — largest in the state, but also the world, with over 600,000 square feet of gaming space — is owned by the Chickasaw Nation, forced from their ancestral homelands in the nineteenth century and resettled here in Indian Territory. Just north of the Red River, Oklahoma’s southern border, WinStar is a popular destination for Texans on holiday. One young man, an Uber driver in Fort Worth, told me he frequents the casino on weekends to shoot craps. To avoid the grannies and other day trippers, he hits the tables in the wee hours, at three or four o’clock on a Sunday morning. That’s when the serious gamblers are playing, my driver told me, and if you show up then, patient and diligent as a novice in the deep darkness of the Lord’s Day, those experts are often willing to unravel for you the skills and secrets of the dice.

A friend teaches high school in Oklahoma City. He’s a patient man, with a passionate vocation as an educator. But the young adults he teaches have lost their souls, he tells me, though he’s quick to point out it’s not their fault. Whether rich or poor, few have been afforded a genuine human upbringing, their lives instead offered to pagan idols in slow motion.

As an experiment, each year he asks his class two questions — one about violence, and another about pornography:

“I have them raise their hand if, by no fault of their own, they have come across someone’s violent death online with no context or warning. Then I say keep [your] hand up if this has happened more than 5 times, more than 10, and I start jumping. I always have at least one who thinks they’ve seen over 50.

“Then I repeat the process with explicit sexual content, again reiterating that I’m asking if they’ve come across this [through] no fault of their own, 1 time, 5 times, etc.

“The impact happens when I ask them right after if they feel like, from the perspective of evolution, our brains are in any way designed to make sense of watching someone getting beaten to death by a cartel in between a yogurt ad and a Tik Tok dance.

“When I ask them what ‘happens’ when this exposure happens over and over, I think the most helpful phrase happened this year — one of my seniors called it entering ‘survival mode.’”

A conquered nation, then — stranded without recourse in a moral wasteland, dark and dreadful. But conquered by whom?

The state of Oklahoma uses exclusivity fees paid from tribal gaming revenues to help fund public education, now close to $200 million annually. The Oklahoma Association on Problem Gambling & Gaming reports “nearly 1 in 3 Oklahomans (29.8%) may benefit from harm prevention, intervention, or treatment to address gambling-related issues.” But given this statistic is derived from the totality of Oklahomans, forty percent of whom by OAPGG’s own reckoning are not casino gamblers, the true impact of tribal gaming on those who participate is far more sobering: of the sixty percent of Oklahomans who report gambling in the past year, altogether half are crippled either fully or partially by addiction and disorder. Even odds, so to speak.

The state funneling these ill-gotten gains to its schoolchildren — students who by and large have already seen much of what should not be seen — describes well that cancerous reciprocity foundational for understanding American culture of the twenty-first century: as a house of cards built upon vice and neglect; upon that selfishness our progressive forebears desperately sought to inculcate; ultimately upon the terror of souls.

Faced with our own memories of violent metamorphosis, my wife and I chose to homeschool our six children. Already they recognize the gift of their upbringing — for even as we keep from them the worst of the past, they still have eyes to see what surrounds us. Our eldest daughter twice worked as a camp counselor, and came home to tell her siblings how lucky they were to have love in their lives — for few of the children she encountered, whether rich or poor, were afforded that genuine human upbringing. Those children’s hearts were starved, she told us.

But our path is different. Not stranded, our children roam for now unhindered over the broad possessions of their own humanity: a tiny tribe of blanket Indians, so to speak, unburdened by the white man’s ways.

Listen: when the Cherokee were forced from their ancestral homelands in the nineteenth century and resettled here in Indian Territory, 1 in 8 died along the way. That tribe’s journey is remembered and mourned as the Trail of Tears — but there aren’t yet words dire enough for what you and I have so lately endured, caught in the love and cruelty of the gods.

Brian Kennedy is the founder of Lydwine, as well as the frontman and principal songwriter of the arthouse country band The Cimarron Kings. He lives with his wife and six children in Guthrie, Oklahoma.

NOTES. Public domain 35mm footage from the San Diego Transportation and Storm Water Department, contributed by the City of San Diego to the archives of California Revealed - Ovid’s Metamorphoses translated by Rolfe Humphries, Indiana University Press, 1955 - for details on the early days of compulsory education on the Cheyenne and Arapaho reservations, see the Sixty-Second Annual Report of the Commissioner of Indian Affairs to the Secretary of the Interior, 1893 - for the Concho Indian Boarding School, see Associated Press, “Indian Rain Song Proves Effective In Clinton Drouth,” Miami Daily News Record (Miami, OK), May 9, 1939 and “Was It Only A Coincidence?” Ukiah Republican Press (Ukiah, CA), May 17, 1939; Rob Gloster, United Press International, “‘The Big White Father is taking Little Concho away’,” Hutchinson News (Hutchinson, KS), May 18, 1982; Oklahoma Indian School Magazine, Volume 2, Number 2, February 1933 - for Colonel Richard Henry Pratt, see Our Forlorn Indians: An Address In Behalf of the Indians, at the Thirty-fourth Annual Lake Mohonk Conference, October 18, 1916, as published by the Berkeley Daily Gazette, 1917 - “uncompromised by the exercise of power…” quoted from Christopher Lasch’s The True and Only Heaven, W.W. Norton, 1991.

Special thanks to GVN — a bosom friend in the desert of the real.

“What in our lives is burnt
In the fire of this?”
- Isaac Rosenberg, “August 1914”

ONE. As a boy, I gathered the past in fragments, gleaned from the wreckage of memory.

At our Carnegie library, on a shelf in the reading room, a clutch of sepia-toned photographs, formal portraits of our civic forbears, men in uniform, all from the Great War. In one, a doughboy kitted out in combat dress, cocooned in a steel helmet and a gas mask. The picture’s special pathos, its narrative burden, eluded me: I was too young to appreciate the vulnerability of an ordinary soldier — a decent, patriotic boy who might have hustled into the trenches with Robert Service or Adventures of Huckleberry Finn in his haversack — desperate to protect himself from the whims of industrial warfare.

Instead in my ignorance I assumed, because of the mask, that this young man had in the madness of war deliberately abandoned himself to facelessness, seeking an inhuman visage as a matter of intent, hungry to initiate his fellows, and now me, into the high modernist sublimities of terror and transformation.

In the cemetery beside the library, a white wooden obelisk dedicated to the Unknown Dead, which I imagined still cradled, rescued from the mud and blood of the Meuse-Argonne, a jumble of ancient, nameless bones.

TWO. “If I ever come to the Nile again,” wrote Henry Adams to an English friend in March 1873, “I shall go as far as Thebes on a steamer or by rail, and pass the winter in Nubia.” Befitting their dignity as wealthy and well-connected Americans — with Adams himself the grandson and great-grandson of two presidents — after marrying in June 1872 he and his new wife, Clover, spent their honeymoon year in opulent style, in motion, crossing the Atlantic from Boston by steamship for a tour of England and the Continent, showered along their route with wedding gifts from adoring friends and family: a silver tea bowl; gold bracelets and bangles; coffee cups from Berlin’s Royal Porcelain Factory; a William Blake print of Ezekiel among the exiles in Babylon, mourning his doomed wife in India ink. In Cologne they stopped at the Church of Saint Ursula, where the bones of martyred virgins adorn the walls. At Lake Como, it rained. Finally, in late November, with Italy behind them, they crossed the Mediterranean to Egypt, for a leisurely sail up the Nile in a crewed dahabieh called the Isis.

In London, anticipating the wonders of their Egyptian sojourn, Adams had purchased what he called in his letters “a photographic apparatus,” and as the newlyweds journeyed north began making and printing photographs, using the standard wet-plate process of the era, cumbersome and chemically intensive: of himself in the cabin of the Isis; of their boat anchored along the riverbank at Philae; of the magnificent sandstone columns at Karnak.

In February, after nine weeks upriver, they stopped at the temple of Abu Simbel, still in its original location, where Clover penned a letter to her beloved father:

“The rock temple is the most wonderful thing we have yet seen — an immense dome-shaped mountain rising sheer from the river’s edge. A temple is cut into it. On each side of the entrance immense colossi are seated, between sixty and seventy feet high. The faces of several of them are quite perfect and the expression of power and sweetness is very striking. Henry has been working like a beaver at photographing both at Philae and here, and has taken several views which are very good, at least to those who have been to the places. He had much trouble with those at Abu Simbel and can’t tell until they are printed whether they are a success or not.”

Later, Adams enclosed one such print from Abu Simbel in his letter to that aforementioned English friend, “not because it is the best I have taken, but because it is the grandest subject, and none of the professional photographs for sale here have at all caught its spirit… I do not hesitate to say that my photograph is worth half a dozen of any I have yet met.”

THREE. As a boy, I dreamt of houses, sprawling and confused, cramped and filthy, dark, plagued by phantoms.

We came to Whitefield when I was barely a toddler, in October 1978, to an old farmhouse poised amid forest and green field, with mountains heaped along the southern horizon. But the land was never ours, nor the house, and so over those years of childhood hung an impression of borrowed inheritance, as though I were billeted upon the unquiet grave of the past, eyes alert for next of kin.

The big house next door was built before the Civil War, and in the last years of slavery sheltered fugitives bent on reaching freedom beyond New Hampshire’s northern border. Across the road, tucked against a screen of cedar trees, a small cottage called End Hut, where our landlord and his wife, an elderly couple, stayed during their annual summer holiday. Farther across the field, a boarded-up old barn, once a summer repertory theatre, the heart of a mid-century artists’ colony bankrolled by our landlord’s paternal uncle, William Bunton Chase, formerly a music critic for the New York Times. As a boy, Uncle Billy attended the premiere performance of the Metropolitan Opera, and would later while working at the Times befriend such luminaries as Enrico Caruso, Isadora Duncan, and Antonio Scott. “The king is dead,” he wrote when Caruso died, “but art is long and opera is longer.”

In July 1889, when Chase was only sixteen years old, Barnum & Bailey’s “Greatest Show on Earth” pitched its canvas in the field across from the big house, offering for tiny Whitefield and its environs a panoply of circus wonderment: bareback equestrians; trained pigs; performing stallions; Bedouin Arabs; Parisian dancers; contortionists; snake charmers; twin albinos; twin Texas giants; a broadsword tournament of Japanese knights; a racing horse called Oscar Wilde; and even Admiral Dot, the famed midget clown.

A special sideshow advertisement promised:

“Dr. Frank Hoffman’s mammoth black tent of chaste, beautiful and wonderful living supernatural illusions and visions, exhibiting a series of startling theosophical delusions and ethereal phantoms by modern scientific means. Also strange and curious automatons which do everything but talk, all of which are exhibited in the large tent. A most weird, remarkable and delightful entertainment.”

“Business big,” the Barnum & Bailey route book recorded, “The natives are in from the backwoods for a hundred miles around.” On summer holiday in Whitefield from his boyhood home in Syracuse, young Bill Chase made photographs, employing a new dry-plate process less burdensome than the wet-plates used by Henry Adams in Egypt: of a dozen elephants; a dazzle of zebras; a team of draft horses with a wagon load of tent poles; and the big top itself, tabernacle of astonishment, foregrounding the church steeples and houses of the village, the graceful silhouette of Cherry Mountain on the far horizon… that same spectacle of temple and high place I saw every day of my childhood, only without this strange and splendid Jerusalem descended from on high, jeweled and comely, a throne of reckoning demanding my obeisance.

William Bunton Chase died in the summer of 1948, and was buried in the Chase family plot in the cemetery beside our Carnegie library, near the white wooden obelisk dedicated to the Unknown Dead.

FOUR. In the spring of 1883, after visiting Barnum’s Circus at New York’s Madison Square Garden — she found the hippodrome races especially thrilling — Clover Adams herself began making photographs, keeping track of her work in a small notebook, of all her successes and failures in the action of light: of Henry at work in his study; of the couple’s three Skye terriers enjoying a tea party; her beloved father in a horse-drawn carriage; the seashore near the family home in Massachusetts; and a number of artful portraits of friends and family, including an especially elegant exposure of General Nelson A. Miles, wounded at Chancellorsville, whom the Plains Indians nicknamed “Bear Coat,” and who later collapsed and died in 1925 while attending the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus with his grandchildren.

“I’ve gone in for photography,” Clover wrote her friend Clara Hay, “and find it very absorbing.” But when her portrait of historian George Bancroft was proposed for the cover of the Century, a national illustrated magazine renowned for publishing the first excerpts of Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Henry demurred.

An unknown photographer captured an image of Clover in her married years, posed in walking dress in three-quarter profile, with much of her face save mouth and jawline obscured by a sunbonnet, gloved hands holding close a restless terrier. The dog’s squirming, its unwillingness to remain still for the several seconds needed to expose the photographic plate, combined with Clover’s enigmatic facelessness, gives the portrait an unsettling kinetic quality — a motion in stillness, a stillness in motion — perhaps complimenting and anticipating Eugene O’Neill’s poetic conclusion that “our lives are merely strange dark interludes in the electrical display of God the Father.”

In December 1885, after suffering the death of her beloved father, and a lifetime of tragedy and depression — including a complicated and childless marriage to the grandson and great-grandson of two presidents — Clover Adams died by suicide, drinking from a vial of potassium cyanide otherwise used by her as a fixing agent for developing photographs, but now, as noted by a friend, the writer Henry James, become “the solution of the knottiness of existence.”

Responding to a letter of condolence from Oliver Wendell Holmes, a longtime friend of the couple whom Clover photographed in February 1884, Henry Adams wrote:

“Your kind letter touches me so closely that I hasten to thank you for it; fearing that if I lay it aside I shall never have courage to open it again. You will not expect me to say anything. All my energy is now turned to the task of endurance; and you, as physician and as poet, know that the effort to endure, if not as exhausting as the effort to express, is at least as painful. I can only thank you, and I do it with all my heart.”

FIVE. I remember blue jays at the window, the smell of woodsmoke, and honeybees at work in the clover. I dreamt of a giant come down off the ridge behind our house, barbarous, trampling through forest and field in the gloaming. I hid in the woodshed and watched through the gaps between the boards.

Only a scattering of memories of my father still with us, phantoms from the disused attics of the mind: waking up at dawn to find him just come home, in uniform, with its bright, golden buttons and leather gun belt; my mother taken ill at a family dinner, and my father welcoming a doctor in to treat her; sitting together, he and I, talking quietly in the living room, but I can’t recall what he said. Then afterward, older, and the family already broken apart, my father showing up at our door, still in uniform, asking my permission to come inside.

But also a family vacation, and a life-sized mannequin at a war museum, a soldier kitted out in combat dress, in a steel helmet and a gas mask. I know my father was there, my mother and brother too, but in memory I am entirely apart, ensorcelled, terrified, imagining that soldier’s voice, inhuman and burning, not melodious but rather a mechanical churn, of black-eyed insects in the heat of high summer, a song born of the underworld, borne by Orpheus, signaling transformation.

…we dropped off the ridge into the dead land out between the artillery and trenches. Dull quiet reigned here: the gun shock numbed by distance, the land silent from desertion. There was no grass. Where trees had been lay a few jagged, bitten-off stumps, level with the earth. Every square yard of land had been lifted and torn by some shell. Death staggered over the hills in lines of crosses. Life glowed only in a few red poppies oozing out of the raw earth scars. I think the earth, soaked to excess with the blood of men, had from it given body to these flowers…”

Down the road from our house, behind Uncle Billy’s boarded-up barn theatre, lived an elderly widow, Mrs. Sparks, our landlord’s sister. The old woman’s husband, David Rhodes Sparks — whom she married in the big house in 1927, surrounded by friends and family — was dead by then over a decade, and spent some years before his death a semi-invalid. We found one of his wheelchairs abandoned in the forest and rolled it back to the house, where my mother kept it parked on the front porch to cradle potted plants.

In the ‘20s and ‘30s, Sparks wrote pulp fiction novelettes for Adventure and Amazing Stories, unreadable melodramas about ape-men in Mexico and German mad scientists in outer space; but also a tender and lyrical memoir of his service in the Great War, driving for the American Ambulance Corps, organized with the help of the writer Henry James, shuttling wounded poilus away from the front near Verdun. Within the manuscript, privately printed, a clutch of sepia-toned photographs: of French children gathering flowers; of his ambulance, parked near the trenches; a portrait of General Pershing; and even the author himself, in the bloom of youth.

“But it was sad,” Sparks wrote, witnessing the mute piles of the dead, “oh, so terribly, unutterably sad.”

SIX. After her suicide, Adams rarely mentioned his wife. Even in The Education of Henry Adams, his celebrated autobiography, for which he won a Pulitzer Prize, he passed over the years of their marriage in silence, his grief private and irreparable. An American Ecclesiastes, he gleaned from his years of privilege, wealth, and intellect only vanity of vanities, which even cleverness could not protect. “He felt nothing in common,” he wrote, “with the world as it promised to be.”

As a widower, he toured the Orient, and learned to ride a bicycle. In 1900, he attended the Paris Exposition, bewitched by its Palace of Electricity, with its great hall of dynamos, another tabernacle of astonishment, conjuring voltaic dawnlight for a new and terrible age:

“…to Adams the dynamo became a symbol of infinity. As he grew accustomed to the great gallery of machines, he began to feel the forty-foot dynamos as a moral force, much as the early Christians felt the Cross. The planet itself seemed less impressive, in its old-fashioned, deliberate, annual or daily revolution, than this huge wheel, revolving within arm’s length at some vertiginous speed, and barely murmuring — scarcely humming an audible warning to stand a hair’s-breadth further for respect of power — while it would not wake the baby lying close to its frame. Before the end, one began to pray to it; inherited instinct taught the natural expression of man before silent and infinite force. Among the thousand symbols of ultimate energy, the dynamo was not so human as some, but it was the most expressive… man had translated himself into a new universe which had no common scale of measurement with the old.”

Prescient as he was, Adams recognized in the work of human hands not metaphor for our unmooring in the machine age — hearts and souls diminished by regimentation or interchangeability — but rather a brute force operative in the idol itself, its excess capacity promising both a blessing and a curse, and driving us always toward a predetermined end. Our machines demand alacrity, even toward death, for unlike frail human beings they cannot stomach idleness.

In the four years of the Great War, trapped in the murderous logic of idolatry — of machine guns and barbed wire, of both the gas mask and the gas — the British Empire suffered a million dead, the remains of fully half of which were unrecovered, lost in a jumble of broken earth and blood. For German boys come of age with the war, one in every three fell in battle, the downfall of a generation in its entirety. After the carnage, in 1925, the French photographer Henri Manuel made a group photograph at a reunion dinner of les gueules cassées, the broken faces, soldiers horribly mutilated by bullets or shrapnel, and so marked thereafter publicly as acolytes of the modern age, and captured now in perpetuity, sepia-toned, by the action of light.

Henry Adams lived to see much of the Great War, but not its end. He died in the spring of 1918, as the first American troops arrived at the front. Buried with his wife, their grave is marked by a bronze statue commissioned by Adams after Clover’s death, of a shrouded figure, seated in repose, its face quite perfect but nearly lost in darkness.

SEVEN. Some things should not be seen, and some things cannot be said.

I remember a girl I grew up with in Whitefield, who put a shotgun to her stomach and pulled the trigger. A friend strung out on drugs, who started hearing voices, so fled to live among the tombs. A grade school ex with two abortions before she finished high school. And on and on — all fragments, caught in the action of light.

I remember the worst thing I ever heard — alone in a hotel room after a wedding with a friend of a friend. In those days I was already married myself, still without children, unemployed and living through what I now realize was a protracted nervous collapse. This man, of a similar age, told me a story from his past, about two desperate women at a motel — one ran, one stayed — and in the telling, chugging bottles of beer throughout, presented what happened as though enough distance were established between who he was and who he’d been to make this tale endurable, as if it were as simple as recognizing the past as past, and moving on. But the despair of the story was palpable, still hangs in that room like smoke, until in memory it’s she alone — that faceless girl — who rises to inhabit the heartache of the real, with we two left as phantoms, restless and burning, overcome.

But still, I also remember when my eldest son was born, being stunned by his frailty, knowing from experience just how quickly a child’s life can come undone — and in that moment of measured innocence recognizing a certain bleak patrimony, as though a child of Moses with barely any memory of Egypt, who grew up knowing only the desert, habituated to wandering, was suddenly settled among milk and honey. Which is to say, I have to be a father to him, a good father, regardless.

He keeps a picture of me, from my childhood, on his bureau. I can barely stand to look, but his sisters often find him staring. He knows he looks like me, you see. He wants to know he looks like me.

Brian Kennedy is the founder of Lydwine, as well as the frontman and principal songwriter of the arthouse country band The Cimarron Kings. He lives with his wife and six children in Guthrie, Oklahoma.

“The soul must learn to abandon, at least in prayer, the restlessness of purposeful activity…”
- Romano Guardini, The Spirit of the Liturgy (1935)

For circus day, in the second week of October 1907, the Santa Fe Railroad offered a special rate to circusgoers bound for the city, with one conductor declaring afterward that crowd of eager and expectant revelers the single biggest load his line ever hauled. Guthrie, capital of Oklahoma Territory, boasted then a population just shy of twelve-thousand, but with nearly half again as many out-of-towners come to see Barnum & Bailey’s “Greatest Show on Earth,” a common autumn Thursday became an occasion of unqualified astonishment, and in sheer numbers alone the adolescent city’s most uproarious moment since its founding some two decades prior, thereby confirming James Bailey’s shrewd dictum: “Any fool can start a circus. It’s the smart showman that knows where to put it.”

By the time the circus came to Guthrie both Bailey and his partner P.T. Barnum were dead. At the close of the 1907 season, after a final show in Dyersburg, Tennessee, Bailey’s widow would sell her husband’s circus to the Ringling brothers, giving those sibling impresarios of Baraboo, Wisconsin complete control over the nation’s premier circus properties: not only their eponymous own, and now Barnum & Bailey, but also the Adam Forepaugh and Sells Brothers Combined Circus, and Buffalo Bill’s Wild West. Though still ostensibly in the business of peddling wonder, the circus shows of the era endured fully the brutal market pressures of a newly industrialized America, with cutthroat competition, consolidation, and economies of scale the norm. What seemed exotic and bespoke — the elephants and camels, the aerialists and freaks — was in actuality a modern industrial enterprise, preoccupied with efficiency, and in action compared more than once, with its precision and ruthlessness, to a grand army on the move.

The circus arrived in Oklahoma Territory by rail, hauled down from Arkansas City, Kansas on five special trains, and at dawn on October 10th pitched its tents on the far side of Cottonwood Creek, in an open field owned by James Oliver, manager of a local cotton mill. Barnum & Bailey boasted twelve acres of canvas on its lot, a small city of satellite tents in support of the looming big top, elegant and unmistakable, nearly as wide as a football field and twice again as long, with room inside for an audience of ten to fifteen thousand, enjoying the circus spectacle enacted across three rings, two stages, and a hippodrome track.

Acrobatic bicyclists; somersault riders; sword swallowers; daredevil ski-jumpers; juggling comedians; high-jumping horses; a herd of giraffes; a mock battle of baby elephants; and even a pageant of three hundred performers enacting in allegorical fashion the outcome of the recently concluded Russo-Japanese War. The scale was such that even while admitting the show’s obvious magnificence, and conceding as well the truth of that basic American predilection for bigger-as-better, some felt there was simply too much to see, especially if asked to see it all at once, and so waxed nostalgic for the simpler, poorer circuses of youth, played at a country crossroads in a single tanbark ring, with only a pair of tumbling clowns, and a solitary wire-walker poised above the crowd.

“There are all sorts of opinions about the circus,” one newspaper noted sagely:

“Some condemn it as an expensive humbug that takes thousands of dollars out of the country, and others defend it as an educating show where the possibilities of teaching dumb animals is demonstrated and where athletics reach a high degree of perfection. Everybody goes to the circus, however, regardless of what he or she may have said about it previously… Circus day is a great educator in practical things. We come as near getting next to human nature on circus day as any time in life, and the more we study it the worse are we puzzled.”

Because to dismiss, in practical fashion, even with its educative elements, the circus as mere entertainment is to avoid the essential seriousness of the encounter it suggests — offering for its audience, as in one of Barnum & Bailey’s celebrated opening pageants, a cosmic allegory for the supernatural end of mankind. What the circus public anticipates, caught in its quotidian toil, is not diversion but fulfillment, a foretaste of paradise, and a promise of human possibility wherein the gifts of the glorified body described by Bonaventure and Aquinas — subtilitas, agilitas, claritas, impassibilitas — are prophesied in flesh for fleshly eyes to see. Death-defying acts are only relevant where the fear of death is a common bond, the acceptance of suffering an expectation, and so to dismiss the circus in its sublimity is to dismiss, in philistine fashion, the grief of being alive.

In each show of the 1907 Barnum & Bailey season, the audience witnessed the so-called “Dip of Death,” a four-second stunt in which a young woman, Miss Isabelle Butler, mounted high above the crowd in a single-seat automobile, raced down a curved track at high speed, her route quickly looping under itself, she and her auto suddenly upside down and hurtled through empty space across a forty-foot chasm, only to be welcomed in flight by another waiting ramp, and so landed gracefully thereafter on the ground, to raucous applause.

Miss Butler, who first saw the act at the Folies Bergère in Paris before taking a turn at the wheel herself for Barnum & Bailey, described for the newspapers the absolute thrill of her vocation:

“To be the center of interest — the magnet toward which thousands of eyes are drawn — to see the tense faces of the audience — to know that their hearts are beating tumultuously, half in fear, half in expectation — to see men and women nervously turn away their heads, and then, drawn by a power they cannot resist, staring up at the aerial auto, awed, and yet fascinated — to feel the awful silence in the great tent as the car shoots through space, upside down — and — finally, to hear the great burst of applause as the machine lands safely on the second runway and runs safely to the ground — surely these things are worth something to a girl to whom the love of excitement and danger are second nature.”

Appearing alongside Butler’s interview in the Guthrie Daily Leader, only days before the arrival of the circus, was a small notice for the drugstore of Guthrie’s own C.R. Renfro, advertising, in characteristically euphemistic fashion:

MADAME DEAN’S FRENCH FEMALE PILLS. A SAFE, CERTAIN RELIEF for SUPPRESSED MENSTRUATION, NEVER KNOWN TO FAIL, Safe! Sure! Speedy! Satisfaction Guaranteed!

A burden in flesh never clearly articulated, but always understood.

Near the grave of Daisy Roe, heroine of my previous dispatch, lies buried another woman, Elsie Cornforth, who died in childbirth in January 1922, just shy of her thirty-fifth birthday, leaving her husband a widower with five small boys to raise. Mary, the daughter Elsie died delivering, lived herself only six weeks, and is buried beside her mother.

So successful have we been in America pursuing the progressive ideal of banishing grief from our midst, we seldom consider that until quite recently, motherhood was often a mortal concern. My wife and I know several women, mothers all, who in an earlier age would simply be dead. Miss Isabelle Butler, herself a wife and mother despite her billing, and whose predecessor on the “Dip of Death” actually died in performance, surely understood the stakes:

“You will ask — were you afraid the first time you attempted the feat? Frankly, I gave no thought whatever to the danger of the act. I knew that what had been done by one woman could be accomplished by another, is she had nerve enough. And I wasn’t worried about any lack of that essential. Besides, I was — and am, a fatalist. What is to be will be, is my creed. So long as everything goes right, well and good. If it goes wrong — well, that is another story.”

Not every woman is so fearless. T. Gaillard Thomas, a physician who published an influential 1895 series of lectures on Abortion and its Treatment from the Stand-point of Practical Experience, told of a doctor’s wife who, thinking herself pregnant and terrified to suffer again the puerperal fever of her last confinement, attempted a self-managed abortion with a thirteen-inch iron umbrella rib, with the metal in the course of the surgery somehow lost inside her body. After she died from septic infection, an autopsy found the metal rib had pierced her vaginal wall, travelled upward through her abdominal cavity, and lodged in her diaphragm and lung. The autopsy also found that, despite her alarm, she hadn’t been pregnant after all.

Fear for the body, yes, but also an abiding fear for the heartlessness of others. On the last day of 1908, the Guthrie Daily Leader reprinted an editorial message from a Kansas newspaper, detailing the sad story of a young man and woman, engaged to be married, but finding themselves pregnant three months before the nuptial date, sought the grisly services of a Kansas City abortionist. The girl, Wilma Ewan, died from complications, and her beau, Leon Detlor, in his grief threw himself from the fifth floor of the Kansas State Capital building in Topeka. The editor, up in Atchison, was wracked with dismay:

“…the man was young and heedless, and the girl, like the manner of all girls in love, believed he would not counsel any wrong, and thought only of pleasing him. The result is not surprising. The surprise is that the world is so uncharitable that the man and woman feared it so greatly that the young woman went to a strange town, and submitted to a criminal operation, and faced death, rather than let it know her shame. She didn’t know there were any kind people. In her terror of the future, she saw only scorn and contempt…

“They had not wronged others; they had sinned, but the blame of the sin was not entirely theirs; there is a greater blame in the girl’s death, and it falls on everyone who is unkind and scornful and bitter when a girl’s love for a man is greater than her strength.”

Yet over a century later, given our technological advances against the frailties of the human condition, and the radical reorientation of American society against the protocols of sexual shame, one might expect a nation in which abortion is not so prevalent, and not such a central concern, suggesting our earlier fears have been supplanted, and what possesses us now is a fear of dependence itself — which amounts, when all is said and done, to a generalized fear of being alive. But it’s difficult to know for sure, even upon reflection, and calls to mind perhaps the words of a young Oklahoma woman, caught up in a small town abortion scandal in 1902, who refused to give her name or home address, replying simply and politely to all who asked: “That is my own business.”

Oliver’s Field, where the Barnum & Bailey circus pitched its tents in October 1907, is only a few minutes walk from our house, and still mostly open space, with cows grazing beside a grove of spindly green trees. I travel by the field almost daily, and try to imagine a past I can never see — for the sad news of the circus is that the show closes, the tents come down, and the trains move on, always. In 1907, after its day in Guthrie, Barnum & Bailey travelled down to Oklahoma City, where a man was caught peeking into the dressing tent of the lady performers, and another man was arrested in the menagerie for spitting on a sleeping kangaroo.

This disappointment, too, has its place in the cosmic allegory of the circus — in the witness of the clowns, those painted vicars of ashes and dust, who remind us that even the greatest show on earth is still not heaven, but only points the way. “A clown is a poet in action,” Henry Miller wrote, “He is the story he enacts. It is the same story over and over — adoration, devotion, crucifixion.” Frank Oakley, who performed for Barnum & Bailey under the moniker Slivers the Clown, a self-styled Emperor of the Realm of Folly, was nationally renowned for his one-man game-of-baseball routine, played along the big top’s hippodrome track. After the 1907 season Oakley tried to make it as a solo act in Europe, but failed and came back to the States, asking for his old job, only to be turned away by the Ringlings, who thought his salary demands unreasonable. Oakley spiraled into depression and chronic unemployment, and eventually took his own life.

The circus still comes to Oklahoma. Driving through downtown Guthrie this week, I passed a brightly colored flyer stapled to a telephone pole, advertising a one-night-only performance of the Ticolini Circus, a small family outfit something like those crossroads circuses of nostalgic memory, where the action is vivid, close, and personal. But the show was last night, during Mass for Holy Thursday, so instead of gathering the family for a drive to the county fairgrounds, we drove to our parish church — Saint Mary’s, founded by Benedictines shortly after the land run in 1889 — to begin our Easter Triduum.

…the Word became flesh and pitched His tent among us…

Days after the circus left Guthrie in 1907, the Roman Catholic bishops of the United States gathered in Pittsburg, Pennsylvania for the Fourth National Eucharistic Congress. At the opening Mass, Bishop Kelley of Savannah preached the homily:

“We priests, who day after day with our unworthy hands raise the Sacred Host on the altar in sublime sacrifice, know what a wonderful presence is hidden there; know what a still small voice comes to us from the tabernacle, filling us with peace and hope. It is not given mortal man to see the wonders of God and live, but I know and all priests know that there abides the great God, the merciful, the gracious, the kind God, the God of life and love.”

Often overlooked in such preaching, taking as we do our religion far too seriously, is the playfulness with which the Lord reveals Himself in the Eucharist — in costume, at the high point of performance, our hearts beating tumultuously, awaiting His arrival, half in fear, half in expectation — bringing once more heaven down to earth, and bringing the past to life.

Headlining the Barnum & Bailey sideshow in the 1907 season, alongside the giantess Miss Rosa Wedstedt, and Vito Basile the Vegetable King, was Jean Libbera, a native Roman born with a conjoined twin, child-sized, protruding from his torso, and billed as “The Man With Two Bodies, Four Arms, Four Hands, Four Legs, Four Feet, Only One Head; First Time in America.”

The photographer Diane Arbus, herself an enthusiast of human oddities, once described a portrait of Liberra she noticed on the wall of Hubert’s Dime Museum and Flea Circus on 42nd Street in New York City:

“I don’t know if people really fainted when they saw Jean Libbera. He looked a bit rueful in a poster on the far wall, standing in a tuxedo sweetly holding the hands of his vestigial twin who grew, head inwards, sticking out of his abdomen and wore, the twin did, little patent leather shoes and a diaper to keep him from wetting his pants.”

Alongside a life in show business, Jean Libbera married, fathered four children, and lived a good life — caring for his tiny twin, christened Jacques, throughout.

Tonight, back again at Saint Mary’s to continue the Triduum, as Rachel and I and our long line of children venerated the Cross, celebrating Our Lord’s passion, I offered up a grateful prayer for Jean and Jacques, their tender and mysterious fraternity bearing the image of the Man of Heaven — a man of suffering, accustomed to infirmity, / one of those from whom people hide their faces — and so an icon of the kingdom and fulfillment, a necessary image for a nation fearful of life, afraid to celebrate, grieving, and so reminiscent of that other American original, as brash as Barnum, who once reminded us, prophetically: “To the hard of hearing you shout, and for the almost blind you draw large and startling figures.”

- Good Friday, 2026

Brian Kennedy is the founder of Lydwine, as well as the frontman and principal songwriter of the arthouse country band The Cimarron Kings. He lives with his wife and six children in Guthrie, Oklahoma.

“Without a long running start in history, we shall not have the momentum needed, in our own consciousness, to take a sufficiently bold leap into the future…”
- Lewis Mumford, The City in History (1961)

ONE. In the early photographs, what seduces the eye is the prairie itself, the emptiness, a grassy plain seemingly exorcised of any useful context, rescued from timelessness and void only by the bare familiarity of the Santa Fe train depot or the screen of crooked trees along the banks of Cottonwood Creek. “There was nothing but land,” Willa Cather wrote, describing a similar scene, “not a country at all, but the material out of which countries are made.”

On Easter Monday, April 1889, the federal government opened for settlement the so-called Unassigned Lands of Indian Territory, clawed back from the displaced Creek and Seminole after the Civil War, and in a matter of hours the last of America’s continental frontier was overrun, a virgin womb of land welcoming within itself a surge of humankind — on foot, on horses, in wagons, by train — each aching, straining toward a singular goal, what one Oklahoma Boomer christened poetically the “Land of the Fair God."

The land office, where all settlement claims need be filed per the terms of the Homestead Act, stood at the crest of a gentle slope directly east of the depot, the two buildings knit together as dry bones ripe for flesh and spirit, for a quickening by means of which would emerge at end of day the newly formed city of Guthrie, declared nascent capital of Oklahoma Territory. But even on the morning of the land run, the crowds restless and expectant, waiting for the noon signal along the Cherokee Strip, the office itself was incomplete, still being constructed, the carpenters racing to fasten the final boards, though nevertheless in enough of a celebratory mood to stop and pose for a photograph: of three men clambering across the roof, working at the shingles; of a half-dozen officials standing idly and self-importantly before the office’s unassembled front door, where twenty-thousand anxious settlers would soon queue to file claims for city lots, or quarter sections of farmland; and even a man in his shirtsleeves, gesturing with his hat toward the unfinished structure, as though we in posterity might have some lingering puzzlement about the enterprise at hand.

But still, in the background, beyond the building’s skeletal frame, that endless, ever-present consummation of prairie earth and prairie sky, looming, gravid, as though poised to overwhelm every bureaucratic vanity and human pretension. “Neither of the wise man nor the fool will there be an abiding remembrance,” Ecclesiastes counsels, “for in days to come both will have been forgotten.”

The provisional quality of the city on that first day is unmistakable, as in an amateur theatrical on its opening night, with the players asking one another, Will we be ready? Will the audience laugh? Or cry? Or chase us instead from the stage? Many settlers arrived in Guthrie dressed as frontier desperados, ready for a fight with pistols and knives tucked in their belts, yet shedding their costumes shortly thereafter, once threat of danger seemed passed, for more prosaic identities — as butcher, or baker, or brewer perhaps. In days afterward, spread from the depot and land office, an unbroken whorl of white canvas tents, likened by some to a multitude of snowy birds alighted on the plain; but also to the Israelites encamped in the crucible of the desert, chasing a pillar of flame, having only the night before abandoned another life entirely, crouched in bloodstained doorways, listening to the cries of Pharoah and his people.

Which is to say, that for those with mettle enough to brave its possibilities, the Oklahoma prairie acts as proving ground, wherein the stiff-necked might be reformed by the Lord as a people peculiarly His own; or else, as at Meribah and Massah, left to a desolation of hard-heartedness and rebuke. The choice is subtle, but steep. For some, like poor Daisy Roe, it was dire.

But perhaps that’s why we came to Oklahoma ourselves, my family and I. Perhaps we needed to come here in order to rescue her. Perhaps we needed to come here to help Daisy fall in love.

"Oh, what was your name in the States?
Was it Thompson or Johnson or Bates?
Did you murder your wife and fly for your life?
Say, what was your name in the States?"
     - an American frontier ballad

TWO. Daisy Roe and her kin arrived in Oklahoma Territory in 1893, from Adams County, Iowa, where her father, Harry Roe, an Englishman by birth, worked a farm outside Corning, near Kemp Creek. Why the Roes left Iowa is unclear, though it’s plausible the family’s fortunes suffered in the Panic of 1893, the worst economic crisis America had yet endured, with innumerable farm mortgages foreclosed across the nation. In Oklahoma, Harry staked a claim on a quarter section a dozen miles southwest of Guthrie, near a tiny hamlet, later called Navina, that grew up alongside the Peavine Railroad, running west toward Kingfisher. Despite the promise of the move, he died of heart disease before the year was out, leaving Daisy’s mother, Sarah, a widow for a second time, she having lost her first husband, a Union soldier, to typhoid fever at the end of the Civil War.

Daisy and at least two of her siblings sought work in Guthrie, away from the family farm. Her older brother, Charley, worked nights at the Pabst ice plant; her younger sister, Ollie, as a dressmaker. Daisy herself secured a position as a domestic. In the spring of 1895, she was barely nineteen years old.

In that year, in the first days of May, the city of Guthrie welcomed in triumph the bullet-mangled bodies of two outlaws, Dynamite Dick and Bitter Creek, associates of the Dalton gang, gunned down in Pawnee County after a month-long manhunt; while certain national factions continued to agitate for the free coinage of silver, organized baseball’s Western League began a new season, in which “Peach Pie” Perry Werden of the Minneapolis Millers would slug a stunning 45 home runs, a single-season record of the dead-ball era that stood a quarter century, until surpassed by the great Babe Ruth himself; and while all of Oklahoma Territory anxiously awaited the opening of the Kickapoo reservation lands for settlement, in New York City, Henry Holt and Company published the first American edition of H.G. Wells’s novella The Time Machine.

On the morning of Friday, May 3, 1895, mourners gathered in downtown Guthrie for the funeral of young Daisy Roe, who died suddenly the day before. As the Reverend L.J. Parker (who once described his native Congregationalism as “sanctified common sense”) concluded his sermon, a city policeman stepped up to demand possession of the girl’s body. Brought before a coroner’s jury and examined by three physicians, the inquest determined Daisy died not from heart disease, as previously claimed, but from the ill effects of an illegal abortion. A Dr. Farrington, who advertised locally as a “Specialist in the Medical and Surgical Diseases of Women,” was arrested and later indicted by a grand jury, as was Daisy’s sister, Ollie. Facing up to three years in prison if convicted, both denied the charges. Farrington’s indictment was later set aside by the court, and presumably Ollie was also allowed to go free.

Such an outcome was not uncommon in the era, when it was often difficult even to determine whether a woman was pregnant, or had been, much less if a pregnancy was ended unlawfully. Proving complicity was doubly difficult. A year earlier, in January 1894, another local woman, Collie Wilson, described in a Guthrie newspaper as “a worthless character,” was arrested and charged with aborting her unborn child, which she and an unnamed doctor were accused of burying surreptitiously in a shoebox. Perhaps the child was stillborn; perhaps not. In the end, without enough clear evidence, the court dismissed the charges and Collie was released.

Why Daisy Roe sought to kill her child, and so inadvertently herself, is simply unknowable. “There’s so much that goes into making the decision for an abortion,” a woman once told me, “it’s just like peeling back an onion, and there’s always more than one reason why the choices happen the way they do.” Before she died, Daisy was four months pregnant, her child developed enough to be recognizably male or female, the size of a grown man’s fist. One newspaper pointed to a young man living near the Roe family homestead as the father; another blamed a preacher, someone like Steinbeck’s Jim Casy, who would fill a gal up with the spirit, only to lay with her afterward in the prairie grass.

Ultimately, Daisy was a mother who could not see herself as such — for the social shame involved, for the loss of her position, or the loss of her dreams for the future — and in this struggle for identity, against the givenness of her gift, she paid a final price. “It is a sad affair,” one report declared, “both for the living and the dead.”

A banal lament solely for the public indiscretion, it seems, for even as the news of Daisy Roe was passed as far away as Salt Lake City or Seattle, the same newspapers carrying her sad tale also carried in their pages numerous advertisements for Chichester’s English Diamond Brand Pennyroyal Pills, a popular patent medicine marketed nationally “to completely restore and regulate the menstrual function… their use involves no detail or symptoms to any one [sic], but accomplishes the result and gives relief in entire privacy, without interfering with the daily routine of life.” But what result? Which relief? The advertising copy, deliberately euphemistic, turns the proverbial blind eye — with pennyroyal known and used since the ancient world as an herbal abortifacient, mentioned in Pliny the Elder, in Galen, and even in the Lysistrata of Aristophanes.

Daisy Roe was buried next to her father, only a mile or so across the empty prairie from her family’s quarter section — claimed in promise, but sown in grief.

"Yonder comes the train, she's coming down the line
Blowing in every station 'Mr. McKinley's a-dying!'
It's hard times, hard times."
     - an American murder ballad

THREE. Our seven-year-old son, born here in Oklahoma, has handsome blue eyes, luminous, almost jewel-like in their limpidity. He’s a boisterous boy, good-natured, and entirely self-assured. While our older children are busy with their schoolwork, he crafts elaborate comic books he afterward tries to sell to us for whatever loose change we have in our pockets. When a teacher asked his class if they knew of someone who was immaculately conceived, and so born without the stain of original sin, he answered, simply: “That’s me. I did it.” He said the same thing when his eldest sister, in a rage, demanded to know which of her siblings had used her toothbrush.

He’s easy to love, as are all our children. Unlike his older sister, who said she would want to see the construction of Egypt’s Great Pyramid, when I asked our son what he would do if, in the spirit of that 1895 novella by H.G. Wells, we could travel in time, he answered, pensively, “I would go back in time and fix all the mistakes I’ve made.” After a moment’s more reflection, he continued: “I would go back in time to meet an earlier version of myself. Then we would go together to talk with another earlier version of myself.”

“What would the three of you talk about?” I asked.

He paused, then shrugged. “Complain about homework, probably.”

A child’s heart, full of love, rests easy in the astonishment of possibility. But if I were somehow able to peregrinate the past — in a machine like that of Wells, handcrafted from brass and ivory, nickel and quartz — I would stop first, in light of this dispatch, with all my adult concerns, not in Oklahoma Territory as you might expect, but instead in Cleveland, Ohio, at the weekly meeting of the Franklin Club, “organized to promote the nationalization of industry and brotherhood of humanity,” on Sunday, May 5, 1901. Speaking that afternoon was the celebrated agitator Emma Goldman, extolling the virtues of anarchism, arguing all free-thinking people should “demand the fullest and most complete liberty for each and every person to work out his own salvation and upon any line that he pleases so long as he does not interfere with the happiness of others.”

In the hall, listening to Goldman speak, was Leon Czolgosz, not yet infamous, a young man adrift. It was his twenty-eighth birthday, and in his jacket pocket he kept a worn newspaper clipping recounting Bresci’s assassination of Italy’s King Umberto the previous summer. Though not yet fully set on killing William McKinley, President of the United States, in the Pan-American Exposition’s Temple of Music later that year, Leon was already using the alias F. Nieman — meaning ‘no one’ or ‘nobody’ — and so already spiraling into a darkness of dissolution and reinvention, as American as baseball or apple pie, feeling that void opening up inside him, something like what Daisy Roe might have felt when she realized she was pregnant.

I would wait until after the lecture, for Leon to finish introducing himself to Emma Goldman, and then as he stepped out onto Champlain Street I would walk up beside him and whisper, quietly, “Leon — you look like a man who wants to know a secret.” This I know would pique his interest, for he had a habit of asking awkward questions about secret societies and secret plots of those hard-bitten anarchists and agitators whose attention he sought.

After his arrest in September, Leon’s brother found in his remaining effects a copy of Edward Bellamy’s novel Looking Backward, a bestseller of the era describing the journey of another time traveler, a Boston gentleman who falls asleep in 1887 only to awaken 113 years later, surprised to find the tumult and catastrophe of late nineteenth century American capitalism matured into a worldwide harmony of enlightened and nationalized self-interest, in which the needs of all are met in abundance. Playing upon Leon’s fondness for Bellamy’s ideas, I might then entice him to the comforts of my time machine, promising him a vision beyond compare — for who among us could resist?

But instead of the distant promise of the future, I would instead, under “the sickly jarring and swaying of the machine,” take us but a few years backward in the past, to 1895 in Oklahoma Territory, in early spring. Leon often told his family he planned to go West, to start a new life, out on the proving ground; but instead he went to Buffalo, and infamy. Together, in the long sunset of the Oklahoma prairie, he and I would walk into the city, into downtown Guthrie, and I would explain at last the secret I’d promised — of what he’d done, of how he’d been remembered. I’d tell him I knew all about that worn newspaper clipping in his jacket pocket, and that all I wanted to do is offer him what, in his burgeoning madness, he’d almost forgotten: a choice.

By then we’d be near the house where she worked, and in the glow of evening perhaps we’d finally catch a glimpse — of young Daisy Roe herself, also at a moment of decision.

I’d hope I wouldn’t need to explain myself, that the sight of her in the lamps of gloaming would awaken in him a hidden realm of possibility — that he’d understand his happiness could never depend on his own liberty, but rather only on the happiness of others; that the story of humankind was not of class conflict or governments, but rather of man and woman become husband and wife, and thereafter father and mother; and that to fall in love, to care for Daisy and her burgeoning child, would be a propaganda of the deed before which even kings might tremble.

But already I can hear the howls, of laughter and outrage: How dare you! Daisy didn’t need a husband, she needed healthcare! Besides, a woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle…

To which I can only shrug, and walk away. It’s only a fantasy, after all — and the dead, I’m told, are beyond all caring. There is nothing new under the sun.

Today I visited the grave of Daisy Roe, not for the first time, at a tiny country cemetery out on the prairie, near what used to be her family’s quarter section, their last desperate claim on America’s vanished frontier. On a clear day, on the southern horizon, shines the skyline of Oklahoma City, and though the roads nearby are still red dirt, soon the city sprawl will swallow the countryside entirely, and the blessed quiet of the dead, broken only by the call of the meadowlark and the blare of a distant freight train, will be lost.

Daisy shares a headstone with her father, in the shade of a hawthorn tree, its buds just beginning to show. Carved into the granite, a bit of funereal verse, barely legible:

"There's a beautiful realm above the skies
And I long to reach its shores
For I know I shall meet my treasure there
The loved ones gone before."

Leon Czolgosz merited merely an unmarked grave. After the electric chair, authorities dissolved his corpse with acid, to prevent exhibition of the remains — a sad affair, both for the living and the dead.

Brian Kennedy is the founder of Lydwine, as well as the frontman and principal songwriter of the arthouse country band The Cimarron Kings. He lives with his wife and six children in Guthrie, Oklahoma.

“Why is it deemed incredible with you if God does raise the dead?”
- Acts 26:8

In January 1977 — the year I was born, a year in which fully one third of all American pregnancies ended in abortion — the State of Utah executed Gary Gilmore, a career criminal and convicted murderer, who gained worldwide fame in our nation’s bicentennial year for refusing to appeal his own death sentence, and insisting the state fulfill its obligation to put him before a firing squad.

Only recently paroled after spending much of his life incarcerated, in July 1976 Gilmore murdered two men in cold blood, shot both in the back of the head with a .22 pistol, execution-style, bloody, senseless acts that bore ironically, despite the idiom, little resemblance to the macabre pageantry whereby Gary himself met an end — strapped to an office chair in a converted prison cannery, hooded, with a small white circle pinned over his heart, shot by four anonymous riflemen in front of family and official witnesses, shot with steel-jacketed bullets to minimize the gore:

“When it happened, Gary never raised a finger. Didn’t quiver at all. His left hand never moved, and then, after he was shot, his head went forward, but the strap held his head up, and then the right hand slowly rose in the air and slowly went down as if to say ‘That did it, gentlemen.’ Schiller thought the movement was as delicate as the fingers of a pianist raising his hand before he puts it down on the keys. The blood started to flow through the black shirt and came out onto the white pants and started to drop on the floor between Gary’s legs, and the smell of gunpowder was everywhere. Then, the lights went down, and Schiller listened to the blood drip. He was not certain he could hear it drip, but he felt it, and with that blood, the life in Gilmore’s body seemed to lift off him like smoke.”

Gary Gilmore sought death not from a sense of justice or genuine remorse for his crimes, but instead out of sheer cussedness, the obduracy of an angry toddler, desperate for control, for a will to power. He hated the thought of a life behind bars, could no longer stand the light and the noise of his prison, craving above all silence — yet still having been unwilling or unable to adjust himself to the comparative repose and daily ambiguity of life on the outside. A firm believer in reincarnation, Gary preferred to take his chances elsewhere, seemingly untroubled by the karmic debt of two grieving widows with fatherless children, and so emblematic, despite having been locked away from Main Street USA for most of his life, of the wooly-headed bourgeois selfishness endemic to the 1970s, mired in its moral ennui, clue that though all lives might be worthwhile, some lives are simply wasted.

                                                    "I am one, my liege
Whom the vile blows and buffets of the world
Hath so incens’d that I am reckless what
I do to spite the world.” 

Nearly a decade earlier, in October 1969, speaking before the members of the American Revolution Bicentennial Commission, charged with preparing for and coordinating the nation’s impending anniversary celebrations, President Richard Nixon suggested our 200th year remain not simply another occasion to commemorate the past, but rather become an opportunity spurring us toward the future, inciting the United States — we who had just landed men on the moon and brought them safely home again — toward ever unprecedented levels of material prosperity and technical mastery. He mentioned as well a certain spiritual quality, vaguely defined but present from our founding, that somehow still persisted as the last best hope of mankind.

Ill-fated as he was, Nixon never anticipated the calamities of nemesis as yet to unfold in America, still reeling from the tumult of the 1960s — that he himself would be hounded from office in disgrace; that our involvement in Vietnam would end in unequivocal failure and humiliation; and that while presiding over the Bicentennial in 1976, in addition to introducing Cary Grant to the Queen of England, Nixon’s successor Gerald Ford would also witness, in an international review of hundreds of sailing ships on New York’s Hudson River, what some insist was the original foothold of the AIDS epidemic in the United States.

In his autobiography, published in the summer of 1979, Ford celebrated the positive impact of the Bicentennial, declaring “the nation’s wounds had healed. We had regained our pride and rediscovered our faith and, in doing so, we had laid the foundation for a future that had to be filled with hope.” But if the nation’s wounds were truly healed, this renders baffling why Ford’s own successor, Jimmy Carter, would deliver a major televised address from the Oval Office during that same summer of 1979, concerned with what he and others saw as:

“a crisis of confidence… a crisis that strikes at the very heart and soul and spirit of our national will. We can see this crisis in the growing doubt about the meaning of our own lives and in the loss of a unity of purpose for our nation. The erosion of our confidence in the future is threatening to destroy the social and the political fabric of America.”

Though ultimately unsuccessful in bolstering our national resolve, Carter’s speech was not entirely wrong, nor were the sentiments expressed exceptional — America had suffered in its past comparable bouts of anxiety and spiritual shambles, even at the height of centennial celebrations in 1876, when the nation reeled at news of General Custer’s demise at the Little Bighorn, his command overrun by savages. But despite his patient concern, as the very image of a progressive technocrat Jimmy Carter forgot the first duty of any godly ruler is not a comprehensive energy policy, but rather to cleanse the land of its idols, to destroy the high places and the foreign altars, to break the statues, and cut down the groves. “I have set before you life and death,” says Deuteronomy, “the blessing and the curse.” The nation — or the man, like Gary Gilmore — who chooses the latter only chokes its own prosperity, and smothers its peace.

In writing The Executioner’s Song, his magisterial account of Gary Gilmore’s final months, published in the fall of 1979, Norman Mailer noted “it’s the first book I’ve written without a clear sense of what I thought and what I wanted to teach others.” Humbled by the immensity of his subject, by a plenitude of souls, laboring in the shadow of death, Mailer avoided skillfully that persistent American habit of transforming human experience into a mere battle of issues, a habit of avoidance and abstraction, as though every individual were but a type, and all particularity unreal. As such, it’s become a model for what I hope to accomplish in these dispatches moving forward — exiling from my own heart that other American habit of always needing to do something: to make a difference, prove a point, or take a stand. Instead, to be something like those medieval artisans, anonymous, who offered in their work adornment even where no eye would ever rest, superfluous, meant only for God.

In 1977, the year I was born, the year Gary Gilmore was executed, and only four years after the Supreme Court handed down its decision in Roe v. Wade, fully one third of all pregnancies in America ended in abortion — over a million dead, one every twenty-four seconds. In this, and in years to come, our nation chose the curse, just as Gary Gilmore did. Unsurprising then that since those days, with few exceptions, we view our future together with trepidation, and little confidence, always a step away from ruin. It seems we can either rest in hope, or kill our children with impunity — but we cannot do both.

Yet reckoning here again the ghost of the one-in-three is not to suggest a necessary policy prescription, a plan of action for a national emergency, nor even to parse out judgment, but rather to recognize simply, as a child of the times, abortion in America as my own original landscape, my native soil and song — and so craft in these dispatches not polemic, but rather identity, personality unfolded in a continuity of darkness, a lifetime restless in shadow, in search of escape, dreaming.

I wrote “Atom Bomb,” the song accompanying this dispatch, two decades ago, over the course of several years after my wife and I were first married, as we began cobbling clumsily a life together from our own fragments. The song’s initial image began with another young couple, recently moved into an apartment directly above us, the husband just out of the Marine Corps, back from tours in Iraq and Afghanistan. They kept to themselves — I spoke with him only once — but one night my wife heard them fighting, only raised voices at first, but as the fight spilled out into the stairwell Rachel heard clearly, again and again, the young wife begging her husband not to leave. But he left, and afterward Rachel could hear the woman upstairs, weeping. A week or so later, the young wife herself was gone, and I noticed a note affixed to their mailbox, scrawled in angry letters by the husband: STOP LEAVING MAIL FOR JULIA A— SHE DOESN’T LIVE HERE ANYMORE!

Oh the wars
Just keep them coming at me, baby
You know I love them all
Through the walls
You hear the conversation falling at you
Like an atom bomb...

In the summer of 1979, at the end of his televised address on America’s crisis of confidence, Jimmy Carter petitioned his fellow citizens: “whenever you have a chance, say something good about our country.” In preparation for this summer’s semiquincentennial celebrations for the 250th anniversary of our nation’s founding, I’ll heed Carter’s advice and publish here a fresh slate of biweekly dispatches for Praise Her in the Gates — seven in all, the number of divine perfection — beginning in two weeks, and ending on June 12th, when the Roman Catholic bishops of the United States consecrate the nation to the Sacred Heart of Jesus, acknowledging for us the kingship of Christ, a somewhat alien sentiment in this land of the free. My narrative begins with a young mother named Daisy Roe, who died in Oklahoma Territory in 1895 after a botched abortion, and afterward meanders — in pilgrim company with Henry Adams, Dionysus, and Pretty Boy Floyd, among others — toward a conclusion of sorts in the New Mexico desert, where the first plutonium bomb, called Trinity, was exploded in the summer of 1945.

I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds...

One final note regarding songwriting, and “Atom Bomb” in particular, a song that began two decades ago, gathering the suffering of others. “Vividness,” a musician friend of mine once wrote, “is a song’s way of producing emotional clarity, and vividness is more often than not produced by imagery.” A vivid image is literally one vital, lively, full of life, and that liveliness is at its best when the image is unexpected, startling. But as any songwriter can attest, oftentimes the strongest images in our songs spring not from careful craftsmanship, but rather fully formed from out of nowhere, seemingly breathed into us by another, truly, in the original sense of inspiration.

In finishing “Atom Bomb” I included the lyric “spitting black spiders, red blood, on the bedroom wall” — and when I wrote this I had in front of mind some darkly prodigal muse pushing up from my insides whole images of otherness from which then to gather my songs. But sometime after I finished writing “Atom Bomb,” and after I played it for my wife, I sat back down again with my guitar to work away at other songs, apprehensive as always that the last song written would be the last song ever written. Beside me was a glass of water, and as I picked it up and took a drink I felt something squirming wildly in my mouth. I spit it out in a panic — a black spider, just like the song.

A triumph, in some sense — a conjuring. But also a horror. What could it mean?

A warning for me, perhaps: Oh my boy, I'll kill you with a black look if you tell a lie...

Brian Kennedy is the founder of Lydwine, as well as the frontman and principal songwriter of the arthouse country band The Cimarron Kings. He lives with his wife and six children in Guthrie, Oklahoma.

This exchange has been edited and condensed for content and clarity.

LYDWINE: William Styron had a quote from Flaubert posted above his writing room door — “Be regular and orderly in your life like a good bourgeois so that you may be violent and original in your work.” With that in mind, what are your habits as a writer, both good and bad? How do you write?

ARBERY: When we had a lot of kids, early in our marriage, I would start getting up very early in the morning to do any writing because it would be a time when I was sure I wouldn’t have the blessed interventions of children. So when I’m working on a big project like this — like this novel or the other two — most of the writing happens between 5:00 and 7:00 in the morning. I would even get up at 4:30 sometimes to get a head start on the day. It usually starts by rereading what I’ve written the day before and starting to revise it; and then as I revise it, I get into adding to it or taking a new turn, something like that. But revising is as much what I do as writing. Because there’s so many new things you can imagine when you’re going over something, some detail that you add that makes it real, or some bit of dialogue that seems called for. That’s more or less the way I approach it. I don’t ever have a big outline — I mean, I guess I do in some ways, but there’s nothing specifically plotted. I often sort of see where the story goes as it unfolds and then go back and revise, and so on. So it’s not like I plot everything out in advance and then just fill in the outline.

LYDWINE: Do you write in sequence? Do you start where you start and finish where you finish, or do you sometimes realize as you revise you need to start again elsewhere, or even jump ahead to write this or that bit?

ARBERY: Yeah, I do that. I did that more with Boundaries of Eden than I did with Gates of Heaven. I had the ending to Boundaries of Eden written well in advance of finishing most of the novel. There’s a long passage at the end of Boundaries of Eden where the character Jacob Guizac is at Yellowstone and has this kind of visionary experience. I had written that and I wanted to go back and make other parts of the novel move toward that final scene. Not so with Gates of Heaven — the ending of it developed really as the end of writing it, and other parts I would write passages that would then get replaced or relocated in the novel as I wrote. They are distinct areas of the novel and so they didn’t need to be written strictly in sequence.

“A wild desperation rose in him. He closed his eyes and saw blackened fields, gutted barns, chimneys and ashes where houses had been. Women stood bitter and forlorn with their arms clutched across their chests. Ragged, hungry children. The bodies of the dead, low crawl spaces full of spiders, strange shrines and flickering candles.”

LYDWINE: Do you write on a computer? Do you write longhand? Some combination thereof?

ARBERY: Some combination — that and voice recognition. When I was a journalist back in the early 2000s, I would often take my digital recorder and go downstairs and just kind of talk an editorial into it, and then go up and transcribe it and edit it and get seven hundred words that way pretty quickly. When I’m writing a novel and I have long passages, particularly passages of dialogue, it’s sometimes easier to speak it all out than it is to try to write it out longhand or do it on a computer. But if I do write longhand, some of the best passages that I’ve written, some of the crucial places in the novels — this goes back even to Bearings & Distances — would be things that I wrote longhand. So it depends. Sometimes it’s just sort of how I do feel that day, can I just sit down at my laptop and write? Or do I need to kind of change the imaginative venue and get my hand involved in it differently? Or can I speak it, you know? I was interested to read recently a Paris Review interview with Ted Hughes, the poet, who was talking about this very thing. And he was saying how longhand is a kind of drawing, and it’s really a different experience than tapping away at keys, and certainly different from just speaking. So, yeah, anyway, it sort of depends. And the final book is certainly a combination of having been composed in all those different ways.

LYDWINE: Did you start your career as writer imagining yourself as a novelist? Or were you enamored initially with other forms?

ARBERY: I was really more a poet when I was younger. I started writing poetry pretty seriously by the time I was a sophomore in college. But even then I would write longer poems. They weren’t exactly narrative, but they were kind of longer, meditative things. They got more narrative the older I got — and I’m talking about into my mid to late twenties. By the time I really stopped writing those — I would say this is probably the late ‘80s — I was tending toward some kind of narrative form. I mentioned in the acknowledgements of Gates of Heaven that I had really thought about a long poem about [William Tecumseh] Sherman. I tried writing parts of it — this is decades ago now. I liked the way Richard Lattimore had translated The Iliad, which was into sort of a six-beat line, a long line, but without a kind of strict meter. Not trying to imitate dactylic hexameter, exactly. I wrote a poem for my wife when we first got married in that kind of mode. But I could never quite get the Sherman thing to work. I got distracted with kids and teaching and all kinds of other things. But I never wanted to leave the idea of doing something with Sherman entirely behind. This novel gave me a chance to do it. The novel was kind of an opening into a larger, more forgiving form. When I started writing fiction, I realized that I could enter into other voices and other minds and deal with stories — make them up, based partly on what happened to me and to others I know, but also, you know, change them in all these ways. It was really fun for one thing to do. And then, you know, I felt like I could get at all kinds of meaningful dimensions of my life and my thought through fiction that I probably couldn’t do otherwise.

“She gazed out at the red rock of the cliffs to the east, striations shaped by wind and water. Time without history terrified her. A thousand years were nothing, a million years, two hundred million. Animals and men and oceans were a drift of shadow across the slowly changing landscape. A vast, empty, unconscious play of elemental forces. Wind without spirit, light without understanding, ice and run and rain but no soul in all the vastness to look upon it and wonder and give thanks for the glory of God, that incalculable expenditure of being.”

LYDWINE: Bearing & Distances was your first published novel — was it also the first novel you wrote? Or were there others?

ARBERY: I had a couple of attempts earlier than that. There was one probably five years before I wrote Bearings & Distances — and Bearing & Distances included some of that, even the themes of it — but it just didn’t work, it didn’t cohere, and it didn’t really have a plot. Bearings & Distances was the first one where it felt like I really had a plot that sustained the whole book. I had written, I guess, experimentally toward a novel but I had not actually finished a whole one.

LYDWINE: Were you surprised in the writing of these novels that you were working toward a trilogy?

ARBERY: I was surprised. When I started Boundaries of Eden, which follows Bearings & Distances, it didn’t even really strike me that it was a sequel at first. I had this image of a boy standing in a field of kudzu. As I thought about that, tried to see what that was about — it turned out to be about the rest of the book. But it was not really conceived initially, I don’t think, as a sequel to Bearings & Distances, but then some of the same characters popped up, and it made sense at that point to make it a continuation. I didn’t pick up all the characters from before, but a significant number of them. Then Gates of Heaven was very deliberately conceived as a sequel to the other two.

LYDWINE: Did you have a similar image you started with for Gates of Heaven, as you did with Boundaries of Eden?

ARBERY: Not in as strong a way, no. It really started to develop that fall of 2020. The first part of the book, where Jacob Guizac gets his assignment from Braxton Forrest to write about Sherman — all that was kind of almost in real time in the fall of 2020, which is when I started writing it. I had recently finished Boundaries of Eden — I think I sent it off, the final edited versions of it, probably in May or June of 2020, and then I started working on Gates of Heaven in August or September of that same year. It was during that COVID year, there were still lots of closures. I was president of [Wyoming Catholic College], and we had to figure out how to deal with getting people back here in person, all of those things, various outbreaks on campus that fall. And it was the Trump-Biden election, you know? It was just all these things. And so I started writing with those things very much present. It sort of developed over the next few years into the form it finally took.

“The war went on and on, like a fire that flares up afresh when you think it’s extinguished. I believe it’s still going on. It might never end.”

LYDWINE: Gates of Heaven isn’t just a novel, simply — it’s a novel of ideas, a novel of recent affairs. So much has happened in our time, and so much continues to happen. Reading and remembering, it brought to mind a Philip Roth quote about novel writing in contemporary America, that “the actuality is continually outdoing our talents, and the culture tosses up figures almost daily that are the envy of any novelist.” You yourself had a great way to describe that memorable first year of the pandemic: “a sad, numb, stupid, paralyzing time.”

ARBERY: If we think back to it, there was so much pretending going on. It was kind of official pretending. We can upset ourselves about this. But it was just a very strange time, yeah.

LYDWINE: The most striking and interesting aspect of Gates of Heaven is that in answering the question of how we got to this strange place as a nation, you bring the reader face-to-face with an unexpected figure: William Tecumseh Sherman, the celebrated Union general of the American Civil War. You call him “the necessary antagonist… for the self-understanding of our time.” Why?

ARBERY: Sherman has always loomed large in my part of the South. I grew up in middle Georgia, my family was from South Carolina. If there was ever a kind word said about Sherman, it was not in my childhood. He was sort of the great demon who had ruined our land. Dealing with him, sort of coming to terms with him from the inside, seemed very important to me to do. But I don’t know that I thought he would be as large a presence in the novel as he turns out to be. I read a lot about Sherman. I read Sherman himself, in his letters and his memoirs, and sort of got inside his voice, both what he said and what he didn’t say. But it’s just that Sherman is such a figure of a certain understanding of secular modernity, of the political claim that that almost precedes anything else.

LYDWINE: For the second part of Gates of Heaven, you include as an epigraph a passage from a letter Sherman wrote to his superior, General Halleck, in 1863: “I would banish all minor questions, assert the broad doctrine that as a nation the United States has the right, and also the physical power, to penetrate to every part of our national domain, and that we will do it.. that we will remove and destroy every obstacle, if need be, take every life, every acre of land, every particle of property, everything that to us seems proper.”

ARBERY: This seems so much at odds with being endowed by our Creator with life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Now it’s suddenly you’re endowed by your government. But if you choose not to, then you have no rights, even to your life — which is extreme. As Jacob, one of the characters, comments: it seems like it’s edging toward totalitarianism as a perspective on things. And I’m not sure Sherman was alone on this — he was encouraged in it. But there were just many fascinating things about Sherman, particularly for a Catholic. Sherman grew up in a Catholic foster home, though his father-in-law [and foster father], Thomas Ewing, didn’t convert until I think he was on his deathbed. But Mrs. Ewing was a devout Catholic who insisted that Sherman be baptized before he even lived with them. Sherman resisted Catholicism very firmly and explicitly his whole life, even as he was having eight children with his devoutly Catholic wife. So he’s an interesting figure in that regard.

LYDWINE: In your characterization of him, there’s a kind of infernal ‘no’ driving this man at his very core. So much so that in reading, his cruelty to his wife and children is almost more distressing than his cruelty as a general — or rather, the latter was simply his cruelty writ large, which was there and would have been there at work even had he never marched his army to the sea.

ARBERY: I guess what moved me most is his deep ambivalence toward his son Tom. Tom was always kind of the substitute for Willie, this son Sherman really loved. He and his wife never got over the death of Willie. But Tom was always having to kind of be as good as Willie, and Sherman’s utter rejection of [Tom] when he went into the Jesuits was profoundly affecting to him. Sherman relented later, and they ended up back on speaking terms at least. I don’t know if I’m fair to the man. I think he was good to his daughters. But I think that ‘no’ is pretty clearly there throughout everything.

LYDWINE: Toward the end of the novel, the fate of Sherman’s soul is caught up mystically with that of one of your recurring characters, Walter Peach, as Peach lies dying of COVID. It’s fascinating that you as a Southerner, and then as a writer, would worry away at the character of this man, Sherman, so diligently, finding in him not some demon figure of history, but rather a man like any other man, in need of judgment. And ultimately, as Peach says to his son, “I don’t think Uncle Billy made it… Sherman’s where he chose to be.”

ARBERY: I went back and forth, wondering whether there was some way to, so-to-speak, ‘save’ Sherman. And I couldn’t get there. He got Last Rites after he was unconscious, and his family was trying to push him over. I think if he had been conscious he would have had the priest leave. It just seemed a matter of principle to him, as with some contemporary atheists. And I’m not sure Sherman was even an atheist — he was probably a kind of Deist, or something like that. He [found] it horrible, the idea of a vocation, of having a vocation — the idea of that just [struck] him as kind of a terrible impiety against the rational universe.

“If he had to ascribe intentions to his instinct, it would be that history overwhelms you — all these souls caught up in the same moment that was unquestionably as real as this one, but that very moment was ungraspable by a single person living in it, even one person looking to his own motives. All the sufferings and small pleasures and acts of lust or greed or cowardice or mercy, all the decisions, all the desire and pain and consciousness barreling along like the trucks on the interstate: and there you were sensing it, feeling it happen with a kind of despair and madness gaining on you.”

LYDWINE: What do we do with history, particularly when it’s so troublesome, when it’s so complex?

ARBERY: I think that one of our real guides to this was Faulkner. When you look at the greatness of Faulkner, it’s particularly because he did not try to dodge the whole issue of slavery. He took on the guilt of it — how many [of the] descendants of former slaves living around him and many Southerners were relatives in the most literal sense, because of the sexual abuses that had gone on in slavery. How do you deal with that? Well, the first thing you do is acknowledge that it was the case, and try to find the story that takes you both into it and gives you some way out of it.

LYDWINE: All necessary throat-clearing aside, what do you think America lost in the winning of the Civil War?

ARBERY: There was a kind of vision, particularly of the Southern statesman, that we almost certainly lost after the Civil War. The early part of the nation was very much informed by the high civility and gentlemanly character of those leaders from the South — certainly Washington, but Madison and others — who embodied a way of dealing with all kinds of people in a way that was largely lost or became suspect after the Civil War. There were several decades of making a great hero of Robert E. Lee — Lee was venerated both by North and South for decades before a kind of turn began, probably in the ‘60s and ‘70s, against him. But I think that valorizing of Lee was the recognition of what had been lost in the war, that there were no figures of similar nobility or stature in the post-war world, which quickly became corrupt and money-grubbing, and all those things that had not been characteristics of the South. The unbridled pursuit of money always had been looked down on in the older understanding of the South — and I’m probably romanticizing it even as I speak. You know, when [Washington] became head of the Continental Armies, having to deal with New Englanders — he didn’t know what to make of them. He couldn’t stand them. You know, they just seemed so rude and self-willed and acquisitive. It’s interesting to see Washington, who does come from this traditional understanding of things, to encounter these Yankees —they’re just, my gosh, who are these people? But as [Allen] Tate says in one of his poems, nowadays, “All are born Yankees of the race of men.”

“There exists among us by ordinary,” W.J. Cash wrote in 1941, “a profound conviction that the South is another land.”

The peculiar burdens of Southern history — of slavery and segregation, of conquering and conquered armies — give the region an almost chimerical place in American memory, too precious to be believed, or even clearly conceived. Can’t the Lakota and Cheyenne of the Plains recall the soldiers of General Sherman with as much dismay as any Georgian? Don’t even Northerners now recognize (in their careful NPR tones) a certain complicity in our nation’s founding crimes? After sixty years — or a hundred, or two hundred — how can that ‘profound conviction’ articulated by Cash endure, if ever it were appropriate? Without lapsing into the ignorant ease of cliché?

Where is the South? What is left?

Think of it — you drive into Mobile for groceries, to your Walmart Neighborhood Market, for your Duke’s Mayonnaise and your Cheerwine and the fixins for your crawfish boil, Florida Georgia Line blaring over the SiriusXM satellite radio. As you round the bend in the road near where the gypsy family sells boiled peanuts in the summertime, you see that old building set back in the trees, all covered over in honeysuckle and Virginia creeper. It might have been a fruit stand or a bait shack, many years ago, but now the windows are broken into shards, the wooden boards are cracked and bleached gray by the sun. It catches your eye, as it always does. Since kickoff isn’t for another two hours, you think to yourself, I should stop and take a picture. It looks so… so… Southern.

But then you remember there may be snakes hidden in all that tall grass grown up around the front, and so drive on.

“History exists,” the novelist Glenn Arbery once remarked, “to be turned into poetry.” When he said it, he wasn’t encouraging mere sentiment — he’s not the sort of writer enamored with the comfort of small epiphanies. For Arbery, poetry is the realm “where the gods could feel their holy space again, where the angel could stand in the threshold.” Where epiphanies occur in his work, the land lies scorched and bare, ready for new beginnings.

In his first novel, 2015’s Bearings & Distances, Arbery reimagined his hometown of Forsyth, Georgia — “in Monroe County,” he told Lydwine, “right in the middle of the state, about twenty miles north of Macon” — as the fictional town of Gallatin. “You could probably find your way around town,” he admitted, “reading.” In Bearings & Distances Gallatin endures the return of Braxton Forrest, a local legend gone some forty years, scion of a failed family, a man of positively Homeric proportions and sensibilities — strong, smart, sexy, and spinning out of control.

By the end of the novel, having come face to face with the worst in himself, his own derelictions and weaknesses, Forrest is laid out in a hospital bed, near death and ripe for conversion, adrift in a brume of dire visions and terrible grace:

“He pushed through hanging bones. Great hooded gray figures sat hunched over something on the ground. Their shoulders dipped and swayed, as though each one were reaching for something at the urging of its appetite. They moaned in voices so low the sound seemed to come up from the very bottom of his hearing, out of the bass vibration in his marrow, then with the smooth quickness of a great cat one of them moved, not standing up, to the other side of the thing they had on the ground. A woman’s bare white arm offered itself from the ground, a turning wrist and hand, as though she were lying in a bath and asking to be helped up.”

That Forrest be brought low by fate and circumstance is a given — Southern novels in which the storms of the past overwhelm the present could hardly operate otherwise. What is surprising is that Arbery dates the narrative’s burden of memory — of race, heritage, and misplaced opportunities — not to the days of the Old South, or Reconstruction, or even Depression-era Jim Crow, but to the salad days of the the late 1960s, a time of immense and lasting change for the region, and when Arbery himself graduated high school.

“I was pretty liberal for somebody in my little town,” he remembered. “I had always had an uneasy relationship to the racism in which I was brought up — to be quite frank, it was a very racist society. I wondered why our maid couldn’t eat at the table with us, you know, and things like that. In the summer of 1968, I went to a program called the Governor’s Honors Program, which was held in Macon and had high school students of some merit from all over the state. There I met people who didn’t have quite the same small-town views as I did, and it kind of turned my head. So I was very much at odds with a lot of what I saw in my hometown in those years — particularly my senior year, which was 1968-69. That’s when George Wallace was a third-party candidate for President, running against Nixon and Humphrey. I wrote a letter to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution that embarrassed my stepfather to death, saying that anybody who voted for Wallace was an irrational bigot, or something like that. It was immoderate, but heartfelt, at the time. I felt myself to be distinct from a lot of what I saw around me.”

He never knew his real father, who died when Arbery was only eight months old, in June 1952. The boy was raised by his mother and maternal grandparents (in the improbably named town of Ninety Six, South Carolina) until his mother remarried in 1957, and moved the newly formed family to Forsyth. Throughout Arbery’s childhood, the heritage and history of the South marked his formation indelibly.

“(There is) that kind of communal memory,” he offered, “which is fading by now, but is still there somewhat — it was certainly stronger when I was a child, around the centennial of the Civil War. My grandfather was born in 1874 — the memory of what happened to the South in the aftermath of the Civil War was still vivid for him. There was a lot of resentment in my stepfather against Republicans, the party of Lincoln, against the moneyed interests, against all these things that were associated with the North. So it’s a very complex region… For any Southerner of honesty, it’s a very mixed heritage. You’re very proud of so many things about the South, about the fact that we have a history, that we have manners, and courtesy, and a love of each other across the races, and so on. Also a heritage of real evil that I think has to be repeatedly confronted. But I have no contempt for the South. It’s interesting how much pride in the South has come back to me on occasions when I find it attacked. I know I’m like many Southerners in this regard.”

Arbery also had from an early age an eye for commonplace detail most appropriate for a burgeoning young writer.

“Lightning bugs… were everywhere,” he recalled for D Magazine in 2007, remembering the Southern summers of his childhood, “I discovered later (to my confusion) that Yankees called them fireflies. Why would they say fire? It was lightning — that strobed moment in the night storm when everything startles out of darkness and instantly disappears. A flash nearby. Where? Here, it flashes. Then, like old Hamlet’s ghost, here. Then 5 feet away, here.”

He was raised in a strikingly formal world — of crew cuts and neck ties and Trilby hats, of bouffants and beehives and flicked-up bobs — which those of us who grew up in later times, and outside the South, might struggle to understand. His high school yearbook, for instance, alongside the standard Southern photo spreads of Friday night football (Arbery himself played #73 for the Mary Persons High School Bulldogs) still listed a good portion of the female faculty and staff by their husbands’ names — Mrs. Hugh Cromer, Mrs. Jack Fletcher, Mrs. Harmon Vedder, Mrs. Harry Dews. It is a vanished world, in some respects, and he lived through the vanishing.

“When I came out of high school, it was the Age of Aquarius. All those songs were playing, you know. The summer of 1969. Woodstock. It just seemed like it was one of those moments in human history when this new possibility emerged… It felt like a moment when the curtain opened above you somehow. Then it all closed again. It’s hard to say exactly what happened… There are moments like that… When Wordsworth (was) talking about the French Revolution, he said ‘Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive, / But to be young was very heaven!’ There was something of that feeling right there in the ‘60s. It was amazing — and also, it seems, very destructive somehow… What happens when you have that kind of Edenic possibility open up?”

In his latest novel, Boundaries of Eden, published by Wise Blood Books in 2020, Arbery returns to Gallatin, and to that pivotal moment of change and regeneration. It is the story of Walter Peach, a once promising poet, now working for Braxton Forrest as editor of the Gallatin Tribune. Abandoned by his mother (a ‘60s flower-child-cum-revolutionary) at an early age, Peach has grown into maturity as something less than the shell of a man, holding the world at arm’s length with an ironic contempt born of his own moral failings. Denied the full truth of his own beginnings, his discovery of who he really is, and how his identity is integrally tied to the larger story unfolding around him — of cartels and dope dealers and a dreadfully evil figure called Cottonmouth, whose venom threatens eternal ruin — makes Boundaries of Eden not only a complex novel of ideas, with a multiplicity of voices and perspectives, but also something of a white-knuckle thriller.

In the shame and promise of Walter Peach, Gallatin confronts the full wash of liquid modernity sweeping across its imagined landscape — not just drug cartels moving into central Georgia, but also the ubiquitous press of YouTube videos and Google searches into fragile human lives, in pursuit of the endless modern project of consumer desire, and “(t)he oldest human fantasy. Pleasure without consequences.”

Arbery uses kudzu — the fast-growing vine introduced into the South in the 1930s and ‘40s, in a misguided effort at erosion control — as a striking symbol for the forces of change at work in Gallatin, but equally for the inexorable call of the past, demanding its due:

““Between him and the road, kudzu as high as his chest broke toward him in the early light like an incoming tide. Wasps floated up from it, bees and dragonflies and gnats. Green wove onto green, surging upward and sideways, reaching everywhere with tender, innocuous tendrils, grasping at anything that could hold it, enwrapping — if nothing else — its own leaves and vines, growing onto itself. By tomorrow a foot more of it would have grown, everywhere, in every direction.”

It’s cliché, of course, to offer that the past can somehow be brought alive. What happens instead, when we speak of the past, happens in memory — in the living, and in the lived.

But the genius loci of the Southern imagination is not that of memory simply, in a refusal to forget. Rather, it’s in the grateful acceptance of a legacy that perpetually offers, and often demands, possibilities for the present. As Faulkner famously noted, “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” In the echo of his heritage, the best sort of Southerner, the careful Southerner — rather than indulging in cliché, or in the preening self-satisfaction that comes from having escaped, through happenstance, the full measure of time’s barbarities — hears the rebuke of the prophet Nathan directed toward his king: “That man is you…”

That the past, despite our best efforts, is a part of our own givenness as human beings is a central concern of Arbery’s work. It’s a theme carefully realized in both the Gallatin novels, but perhaps most beautifully summarized in a passage from his poem “Honeymoon, All Soul’s” published in the Kenyon Review in 1985 — for like his own Walter Peach, Arbery began as a poet.

The narrator of the poem, haunted by memory, is confronted by “the still unsatisfied dead,” a coterie of ancient women who ask:

        “Do you want to see your father?
My father was dead before I was born.
         Do you want to meet him?
Not dead, not a horror.
        Horror? No horror.
But isn’t he dead?
        How could he be dead
          when you are alive?”

“It is true, I am sure, that these are in their essence also timeless shadows,” wrote W.J. Cash, recognizing the first real growths of his region’s literature, soon to come into full bloom, and from which Glenn Arbery now nourishes the roots of his own work, “without place save that they dwell upon something which approximates the earth. They stand in some wise for men of every race and age, at least in the Western world... But in the shape of their personal being, in their own view of themselves and their fellows, in their peculiar tradition, they are none the less decisively Southern.”

Included below are a selection of our favorites sources, certainly not exhaustive, which might do well in establishing a renewed national vernacular.

“America’s Long Vigil” — TV Guide, 1964 — A special section of the weekly magazine published the following January, it breathlessly styled itself “a permanent record of what we watched on television from Nov. 22 to 25, 1963,” including the murder of Lee Harvey Oswald, broadcast live and watched by nearly half of all American families, many just returned home from their Sunday worship of choice. Gripping television, certainly, but whether a medium that brought murder into America’s living rooms might be inimical to the nation’s interests, sinful even, is passed over in silence:

“From the moment the first TV news bulletin cut through the sticky storyline of a soap opera called As the World Turns, at exactly 1:40 (EST) on Friday afternoon, the world of communications — if not the world — was to be a vastly different sort of place, never to be quite the same again. It was not just the sudden, senseless cutting down of a young, vigorous President that made the experience cut so deep, but the fact that no one had ever lived a national tragedy in quite these terms before. When Lincoln was assassinated by a frenzied actor at Ford’s Theater in 1865, Americans had time to assimilate the tragedy. Most people in the big cities knew within 24 hours, but there were some in outlying areas for whom it took days.

“In the new world of communications there was no time for any such babying of the emotions, no time to collect oneself, no time for anything except to sit transfixed before the set and try to bring into reality this monstrous, unthinkable thing. Because the word was not only instantaneous but visual, and because at no time did the television reporters known any more than the viewers did, 180,000,000 were forced to live the experience not just hour to hour, or minute to minute, but quite literally from second to second, even as the reporters themselves did. According to Nielsen statistics, a point was reached during the funeral on Monday afternoon when 41,553,000 sets were in use, believed to be an all-time high. For four days the American people were virtual prisoners of an electronic box.”

“A Critique of the Warren Report” — Dwight Macdonald, 1965 — Included alongside Tom Wolfe’s legendary profile of stock car racer Junior Johnson in the March 1965 issue of Esquire, Macdonald’s droll condemnation of the official Report of the President’s Commission On the Assassination of President John F. Kennedy mourns a national poetics surrendered to the banalities of the so-called best and brightest:

“The Warren Report is an American-style Iliad, i.e. an anti-Iliad that retells great and terrible events in limping prose instead of winged poetry. And what prose? The lawyer’s drone, the clotted chunks of expert testimony, the turgidities of officialese, the bureaucrat’s smooth-worn evasions. For the Homeric simile, Research; for the epic surge and thunder, the crepitating clutter of Fact…

“Now Facts are all very well but they have their little weaknesses. Americans often assume that Facts are solid, concrete (and discrete) objects like marbles, but they are very much not. Rather are they subtle essences, full of mystery and metaphysics, that change their color and shape, their meaning, according to the context in which they are presented. They must always be treated with skepticism, and the standard of judgment should not be how many Facts one can mobilize in support of a position but how skillfully one discriminates between them, how objectively one uses them to arrive at Truth, which is something different from, though not unrelated to, the Facts.”

Jack Ruby: The Man Who Killed The Man Who Killed Kennedy — Garry Wills and Ovid Demaris, 1967 — A finely-tuned and well-researched portrait of a strange and damaged man, murderer of a murderer, in which we discover not the contours of a well-wrought and far-reaching conspiracy, but rather the dangerous emotional instabilities of a grieving nation:

“And this explains why the audience is, for conspiratorialists, such a frustrating one — why there is no more (indeed, a good deal less) acceptance of any other theory, once the Warren theory is discounted. The populace is, for theorizers, infuriatingly bored with details of the plot — so long as the plot is dimly, reassuringly there, protecting them from darker things.

“It is not surprising, then, that Ruby should be used for men’s comfort. We are only doing, in our way, what he first did. He typifies our whole range of response — not because he is a typical American (not at all); because he was so unchecked, obvious and almost primordial, in those days of primitive gestures toward self-preservation. He was the buried child or savage in us all…

“Jack had only one way to get a man out — by simpleminded force, as he threw the punks and pimps and creeps down The Carousel stairs. But others will find subtler ways to exorcise this affront to human reason. They too will turn him into a thing, an instrument of more logical agencies hidden somewhere behind him — just a hired gun. The CIA, or Cuba, or Russia, or the mobs, or somebody did it for a reason. It does not matter who they were — Communists? Birchers? both; who cares? — so long as there was a reason.

“But no matter what finesse they use, we recognize these men. Returning to the mystery over and over, trying to ‘solve’ it, to limit, to dispel it, poring over the volumes of clues, all the odd things that ‘do not fit’ (not yet — the assumption is they will fit if we only arrange them better), pinning their hopes on a new book, on better photographic sleuthing, more debate, examination, science, reason, these men — we know who they are (we should, we are these men) — would like to find a simple, clear, demonstrable explanation; ferret out some individual, some group that logically set the thing in motion, which can be traced with the weapons of reason, identified, pointed to, disposed of. Such men are out, intellectually, to get rid of the assassin; still driven by a need to ‘shoot’ him with words, talk, theory, proof — we all know them. They are Jack Ruby.”

Libra — Don DeLillo, 1988 — Reviewed by George Will in the Washington Post as “an act of literary vandalism and bad citizenship,” DeLillo’s ninth novel pushes the rude mechanicals of conspiracy, e.g. the CIA, organized crime, Castro and the Cubans, to the bleeding edge of believability:

“Nicholas Branch in his glove-leather armchair is a retired senior analyst of the Central Intelligence Agency, hired on contract to write the secret history of the assassination of President Kennedy. Six point nine second of heat and light. Let’s call a meeting to analyze the blur. Let’s devote our lives to understanding this moment, separating the elements of each crowded second. We will build theories that gleam like jade idols, intriguing systems of assumption, four-faced, graceful. We will follow the bullet trajectories backwards to the lives that occupy the shadows, actual men who moan in their dreams. Elm Street. A woman wonders why she is sitting on the grass, bloodspray all around. Tenth Street. A witness leaves her shoes on the hood of a bleeding policeman’s car. A strangeness, Branch feels, that is almost holy. There is much here that is holy, an aberration in the heartland of the real.”

“In Memoriam, J.F.K” — Jorge Luis Borges, 1967 — Lamentation from the sightless Argentine, master of the cosmogonal gesture:

“This bullet is an old one… Lincoln had been murdered by that same ball, by the criminal or magical hand of an actor transformed by the words of Shakespeare into Marcus Brutus, Caesar’s murderer… In earlier times, the bullet had been other things, because Pythagorean metempsychosis is not reserved for humankind alone. It was the silken cord given to viziers in the East, the rifles and bayonets that cut down the defenders of the Alamo, the triangular blade that slit a queen’s throat, the wood of the Cross and the dark nails that pierced the flesh of the Redeemer… In the dawn of time it was the stone that Cain hurled at Abel, and in the future it shall be many things that we cannot even imagine today, but that will be able to put an end to men and their wondrous, fragile life.”

The Manchester Affair — John Corry, 1967 — William Manchester’s The Death of a President remains a gripping blow-by-blow of late November 1963, yet few remember the public legal wrangling involved in its publication, as the Kennedy family — in a fit of pique, grief, and political ambition — worked to suppress the ‘official’ account they’d earlier authorized. When all was said and done, Mrs. Kennedy’s inviolate reputation would never quite be the same:

“Nearly any millionaire can open a publishing house, but he can hardly hope for distinction until he has fulfilled his obligation to history and scholarship and art, and suffered along with unknown writers. Harper & Row was stuffed with distinction, and it knew it, and the book business knew it, and it was a sad and unhappy thing for Harper & Row when Jacqueline Kennedy and Robert Kennedy accused it of breaking its word to them. When Cass Canfield said that his ‘experience in connection with The Death of a President has been the most trying and distressing one in a forty-year publishing career,’ he was saying it in sorrow.

“In a way, though, the fight with the Kennedys was a triumph of democracy. In 1817, when J. & J. Harper published Seneca’s Morals, its first book, Robert Kennedy’s family was scratching about for a living in County Wexford, and years later, when J.P. Morgan said that ‘it would be a national calamity if Harper & Brothers had to go into bankruptcy,’ his grandfathers were hustling for votes in the wards and precincts of Boston. Now, in 1966, Harper & Row was locked in battle with the Kennedys, and for all Cass Canfield knew, it was losing.”

A Mother in History — Jean Stafford, 1966 — Disquieting reportage from Dallas, detailing Stafford’s visits with a still grieving and somewhat deranged Marguerite Oswald, served as fitting inaugural for our post-assassination age, in which the devouring mother reigns supreme:

“The graveyard was deserted; we met no other car and we saw no mourners as we spiraled up between granite lambs and marble cherubim, and Mrs. Oswald plaintively remarked on this. ‘If it had been a sunny day, you’d have seen the cars lined up clear up to the gates, people coming to see where my son is buried.’

“Then, in a moment, round a bend, we did see a car ahead of us at the top of a slight rise. ‘Now there!’ she said. ‘There’s somebody after all, even though it isn’t such a nice day, and they’re coming to see Lee.’

“We stopped directly behind a car, which, apple green where it was not besmirched by mud or scabbed with rust, could not have been less than twenty years old; it was long and broad and uncommonly tall, and its rear window was a high, narrow oval through which no human eye could see. It looked as if, when it had been new and probably black, it had been used as a getaway car. Its occupants were slogging through the mud across the road as we opened our doors. They were five boys in their late teens, all rangy and simianly long-armed and all wearing dirty dungarees, dirty T-shirts, dirty sneakers, shaggy, dirty hair.

“‘They’re headed straight for Lee,’ whispered Mrs. Oswald. ‘Now it’s that age I want to reach with my books. The young people. I want to write it all in a way they will understand and know the truth of history.’”

A Specter Is Haunting Texas — Fritz Leiber, 1968 — Post-apocalyptic science fiction, in which cyborg longhairs float in exile around the Moon, Greater Texas menaces the nations, and Dallas casts its long shadow over all:

“Scully, I can see your heavenly instructors knew only the superficial version of Earth’s history, the one pap-fed to the general public. Since you’re going to be meeting some mighty sophisticated and influential men today, it’s best you know a scrap or two of the truth. Amigo mío, the Lone Star Republic never was of the United States. In eighteen-forty-five she assumed leadership of them, because she could see they needed bolstering against foreign aggression and internal disorder, and that was a most accurate foresight, because she had to spend the next three years throwing back the attack of Mexico on them, and pretty soon she had the Civil War to run — both sides.

“Of course it was given out to the general public of the states, who never had no brains or guts nohow and flustered easy, that this assumption of leadership was annexation — but it was always known to the speaker of the House and the senators who counted in Washington that by secretest treaty Texas was boss. Thereafter the presidents in the White House were just figureheads for the Texas Establishment — Franklin D. Roosevelt, for instance, was the puppet of our Jack Garner, a mighty modest kingpin, just as later on Lyndon the great bossed Jack Kennedy, though the latter was posthumously declared an honorary Texas and president thereof because of the grandeur and ritual importance of his demise. With the coming of the Third World War and the atomization of Washington, New York, San Francisco, and so forth, secrecy became unnecessary and Texas took over in name as well as in substance, including for good measure the frosty top and hot, dry, jungly bottom of the continent. We needed more greasers, anyhow, for therapeutic reasons.”

“Sympathy for the Devil” — The Rolling Stones, 1968 — Inspired by the writings of Baudelaire and Bulgakov, Jagger’s Lucifer begins with savoir-faire but ends in shrieking madness. Barry McGuire might sing about the eve of destruction, but had he actually been there? The Rolling Stones certainly had, with ever more fell journeys yet to come:

“I watched with glee while your kings and queens / fought for ten decades for the gods they made. / I shouted out ‘Who killed the Kennedys?’ / when after all it was you and me.”

That Was The Week That Was: The British Broadcast Corporation’s Tribute to John Fitzgerald Kennedy — BBC, 1963 — Forgoing its usual weekly satire to reckon with what had quickly become the world’s own tragedy, the earnestness and intelligence of the BBC’s ensemble presentation underscored an innocence as yet unraveled:

“There are two men in the world, for the first time since the world began, in whose hands there lies the possibility of bringing all life on this globe to an end, and making its charred remains uninhabitable to the end of time. One of those men looks out on the loneliest view in the world, the view from the White House windows in the middle of our bitter and war-torn century.

“And yet how little true it is that all power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. It would be closer to the truth to say that such power transforms, elevates, even purifies its holder, that the assumption of so terrible a burden, even as it marks out its bearer as a man forever apart, at the same time gives him the strength to lift it. In what manner this man whose identity is less important than his office has come, by degrees, to bear the burden of hundreds of millions who know nothing of him is no longer important, even if it could be determined. What matters now is that we recognize what we have done.

“The loneliness of power is a universally accepted truth. There remains the recognition of the loneliness of absolute power, the responsibility for all life and death, a responsibility hitherto reserved only to God. In a sense, so terribly real that it transcends paradox, mankind has by a conscious decision appointed for itself a God-substitute, and the blasphemy of the appointment by men of one man to live and die for us all is rooted in the ultimate blasphemy of the world — that it made it necessary.

“And so, once again, we are reminded that no man is an island and the bell that tolls in Dallas told for us all. Not only because of our inextricable interdependence; not only because it shows that although it may be expedient that one man should die for the people, it is neither wise nor just; not only because it teaches us all that we cannot slough off our responsibilities by putting them all onto one elected scapegoat; but above all because as the bell tolls it reminds us — in the hideous emphasis it places upon the reality of power — of the frailty of the body in which that power must ultimately rest, and in doing so, prompts us to remember with Montaigne that sit we never so high on a stool, yet sit we but upon our own tails.”

“The Tongs of Jeopardy” — Brother Antoninus, 1964 — Back before Ramparts became a muckraking fellow traveler of the radical left, it was a modestly avant-garde Catholic literary magazine, in which the Biblical sensibility of the famed Dominican poet was brought to bear on America’s grief:

“When a nation falsifies the vision of its creative destiny with a specious logic, and in doing so rationalizes the corruptness that no logic can justify, God himself assumes the initiative, and visits upon it the most paralyzing rebukes producible from the forces latent in its historic situation. Sometimes these come as natural catastrophes, inflicting a stinging chastisement: earthquakes, floods, drought and starvation. And sometimes they came as naked war, so that the militant energies of a people are summoned up, and the confusion in its heart is purged through sacrifice, hardship and service.

“But sometimes not even war, nor any concatenation of natural disasters can be sufficiently efficacious to reach what has to be reached, the somnolent nerve deep in muffled soul of a people. Too vast and too powerful, it may absorb adversity and sustain misfortune, to emerge exulting in the wonder of its triumph and the savor of its strength. Then comes the hour of great moral or spiritual crisis, and something keener, something more acute, more precisely specified to the deceptive complaisance fattening in the entrails of that people is mysteriously prepared and held in readiness, until the finger of God moves ever so slightly, and there occurs an act destined to take its place forever in its heart and in its soul. That people will receive a wound from which it is fated never to recover, a wound with which it must live for the rest of its days.”

“Who Was Jack Ruby?” — Gary Cartwright, 1975 — Published in Texas Monthly in November 1975, Cartwright’s portrait of Dallas in the early ‘60s, madcap and morally third-world, goes a long way toward explaining what in any other American city (outside of Texas, that is) would remain simply unreckonable:

“A lot of bizarre people were doing some very strange things in Dallas in the fall of 1963… Madame Nhu bought a dozen shower caps at Neiman-Marcus and tried to drum up support for the Diem regime in Saigon, even while her host in the U.S., the CIA, laid plans to assassinate Diem himself. Members of the American Nazi Party danced around a man in an ape suit in front of the Times Herald building. Congressman Bruce Alger, who had once carried a sign accusing Lyndon Johnson of being a traitor, went on television to denounce the Peace Corps as ‘welfare socialism and godless materialism, all at the expense of capitalism and basic U.S. spiritual and moral values.’ Zealots from the National Indignation Committee picketed a UN Day speech by Ambassador Adlai Stevenson; they called him Addle-Eye and booed and spat on him and hit him on the head with a picket sign. When a hundred civic leaders wired strong and sincere apologies to the ambassador, General Edwin Walker, who had been cashiered by the Pentagon for force-feeding his troops right-wing propaganda, flew the American flag upside down in front of his military-gray mansion on Turtle Creek. There were pro-Castro cabals and anti-Castro cabals that overlapped and enough clandestine commerce to fill a dozen Bogart movies. Drugs, arms, muscle, propaganda: the piety of the Dallas business climate was the perfect cover. A friend of mine in banking operated a fleet of trucks in Bogotá as a sideline. Airline stewardesses brought in sugar-coated cookies of black Turkish hash without having the slightest notion of what they were carrying.”

The Wounded Land — Hans Habe, 1964 — Despite an awkward and ill-founded attempt to blame the crimes of an avowed Marxist on the nation’s right-wing milieu, Habe’s first-hand account of a trip through America in the weeks leading up to the assassination reminds us the tumult of the 1960s began much earlier than we allow ourselves to remember:

“There they were, the men in the Texas hats, the police in their white caps, there they were, those maplike faces, those bourbon-whiskey faces, all those ‘two-fisted men.’ And there, too, were the reporters, microphone in hand. That fantasy of things to come in which a reporter sticks his head out of a window and asks the suicide, hurtling past him toward the ground, about his plans for the future here became a reality. The man who is accused of being the President’s murderer — he has in any case murdered one policeman, for certain — came out of the elevator. We saw his face in close-up, a brainless kind of face which looked as though it had not been properly finished off by the Creator. We saw everything. There are no secrets any more, except the one secret which really matters… Then Murderer No. 2 comes on from the right, but the audience does not yet realize what he is. Does the producer realize? The cameras, naturally, are focused on the Leading Man, as for the moment the alleged murderer of the President, the murderer of the day before yesterday, still is. Soon, though, he will make his exit and his place will be taken by a new murderer. We only see the man’s back view as he fires. I cry: ‘The spectacles!’ but nobody hears me. I had noticed, God knows why, a pair of spectacles which Murderer No. 2 — we shall have to start numbering the various murderers — carried sticking out of his breast pocket. Those horn-rimmed glasses were the only touch of reality in the whole scene. All the rest might have been an act, a ‘quickie’ film, with clapper boy, wide screen, the lot. But in a film the murderer would not have carried a pair of spectacles in his breast pocket. It is a scene from real life, and that is how life is, in Dallas, Texas.”

The following was first published in the New Orleans Daily City Item, November 1, 1879.

The Night of All Saints — a night clear and deep and filled with a glory of white moonlight.

And a low sweet Wind came up from the West, and wandered among the tombs, whispering to the Shadows.

And there were flowers among the tombs.

They looked into the face of the moon, and from them a thousand invisible perfumes arose into the night.

And the Wind blew upon the flowers until their soft eyelids began to close and their perfume grew fainter in the moonlight. And the Wind sought in vain to arouse them from the dreamless sleep into which they were sinking.

For the perfume of a flower is but the presence of its invisible soul; and the flowers drooped in the moonlight, and at the twelfth hour they closed their eyes forever and the incense of their lives passed away from them.

Then the Wind mourned awhile among the old white tombs; and whispered to the cypress trees and to the Shadows, “Were not these offerings?”

And the Shadows and the cypresses bowed weirdly in mysterious reply. But the Wind asked, “To Whom?” And the Shadows kept silence with the cypresses.

Then the Wind entered like a ghost into the crannies of the white sepulchres, and whispered in the darkness, and coming forth shuddered and mourned.

And the Shadows shuddered also; and the cypresses sighed in the night.

“It is a mystery,” sobbed the Wind, “and passeth my understanding. Wherefore these offerings to those who dwell in the darkness where even dreams are dead?”

But the trees and the Shadows answered not and the hollow tombs uttered no voice.

Then came a Wind out of the South, murmuring to the orange groves, and lifting the long tresses of the palms with the breath of his wings, and bearing back to the ancient place of tombs the souls of a thousand flowers. And the Wind of the South whispered to the souls of the flowers, “Answer, little spirits, answer my mourning brother.”

And the flower-souls answered, making fragrant all the white streets of the white city of the dead:

“We are the offerings of love bereaved to the All-loving — the sacrifices of the fatherless to the All-father. We know not of the dead — the Infinite secret hath not been revealed to us; we know only that they sleep under the eye of Him who never sleeps. Thou hast seen the flowers die; but their perfumes live in the wings of the winds and sweeten all God’s world. Is it not so with that fragrance of good deeds, which liveth after the deed hath been done — or the memories of dead loves which soften the hearts of the living?”

And the cypresses together with the Shadows bowed answeringly; and the West Wind, ceasing to mourn, spread his gauzy wings in flight toward the rising of the sun.

The moon, sinking, made longer the long shadows; the South Wind caressed the cypresses, and, bearing with him ghosts of the flowers, rose in flight toward the dying fires of the stars.

In an oft-quoted passage from The Gulag Archipelago, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn ponders on what might have happened to those “intellectuals in the plays of Chekhov, who spent all their time guessing what would happen in twenty, thirty, or forty years,” if somehow confronted with the barbarity of the Soviet regime, concluding wryly that in such a scenario “not one of Chekhov’s plays would have gotten to its end because all the heroes would have gone off to insane asylums.”

We Americans of the twenty-first century might reflect similarly upon our own forebears, that so-called greatest generation, whose response to a decade or more of privation and war was in babies being made and born, of hearth and home embraced wholeheartedly, in defiance of hopelessness and death.

What then would they make of us, their descendants, who toss life aside now so casually? Who dismiss that most precious gift of freedom — the gift of home?

Nearly two-thirds of all abortions in the United States are now medication abortions, whereby the drugs mifepristone and misoprostol are taken as pills in sequence to interrupt and expel an unwanted pregnancy. Developed by a French pharmaceutical company in the 1980s, and branded thereafter by its enemies as “the first anti-human pesticide,” and even as “the pill of Cain,” mifepristone blocks the pregnant womb’s capacity to absorb the hormone progesterone, and so impedes those changes in the womb necessary for a newly conceived child — perhaps the size of a poppy seed, or a green olive, or even a peach — to catch hold and thrive. Mifepristone leaves the womb, in a word, inhospitable for life, the unborn shaken loose like ashes and dust; and he or she thereafter, with contractions induced by the misoprostol, driven forth from that maternal garden into the wilderness of death.

So as tomorrow’s bards sing for posterity innumerable threnodies for the unborn dead, these disquieting years of ours will no doubt be evoked in strains of most doleful irony, such as Solzhenitsyn himself might appreciate and mourn — for even as the Supreme Court’s decision overturning Roe v. Wade, after half a century of struggle, returns the question of bloody practice to the states, the rise of telemedicine in tandem with the COVID-19 pandemic has made medication abortion more accessible than ever, with over a million more dead each year, and so our moment of victory, that pearl of great price, has revealed itself instead as another palmful of dry bones.

“It’s kind of funny now to think of my 16-year-old self choosing a [medication] abortion. I chose it because it seemed somehow more dignified; I pictured myself going home and cramping out my pregnancy like a bad period and moving on. The only trouble was that there was no such thing as ‘my home,’ so I had my abortion in the home of my boyfriend’s parents, who knew what was going on. I thought I could handle it on my own and just let my body do the work. I was afraid of the idea of a surgical abortion because it sounded really intense, but now having had both types of abortions, I would absolutely advise my younger self to choose the surgical option. It takes four minutes compared to the 48 hours the pill took.

“I spent the whole first day at Planned Parenthood, in and out of the waiting room. I was given the first of the two-pill cocktail in the Planned Parenthood office and then was sent home to take the second pill the following day. When I took the second pill, my body didn’t like it. I started cramping so intensely, and each time I went to the toilet, little gloops of blood clots and tissue swirled into the toilet. It was honestly surreal. I kept cramping and got sicker, and I ended up throwing up a lot. But by the end of the night (I started at maybe 4 p.m.) my body was returning to normal—still cramping, but more at ease.

“I think the abortion pill is so incredibly important as an option for abortion, especially a self-managed abortion. But I hope people know it isn’t a 1-to-1 substitution. The abortion pill can be very painful, and I feel I wasn’t properly warned about how sick I could get. I thought I could just chill out and cramp it out, but it wasn’t like that at all. I needed support and care, which was luckily available to me.”

A foolish man, the Lord suggests, builds his house on sand, not reckoning the peril of such obvious instability. Heedless as always, we Americans in the wake of the Dobbs decision have embraced precarity as our new way of life, confident as we are in the virtues of persuasion, as though we might reason together through every situation to arrive at an equitable outcome.

But the Lord also reminds us that a house divided against itself cannot stand — rhetoric used so ably by Abraham Lincoln, our great emancipator, when confronted himself with another strange patchwork of injustice, a bloody practice condemned in one realm, celebrated in another.

But leaving aside any question of a conflict between the states — polities with the power to compel behavior rather than persuade — on a deeper level these Janus-faced drugs, mifepristone and misoprostol, signal what may be an unmendable tear in the moral fabric of the nation, representing as they do the absolute Americanization of abortion, wherein women might kill their unborn children not in hospitals or clinics, distant and impersonal, but rather in the privacy and comfort of the home, among the familiar, the quotidian, the mundane.

The madness of this outcome is palpable: death in the mailbox, skulls for the parlor door. Home — what should be a place of refreshment, light, and peace, a foretaste of the Godhead’s ingathering hospitality – has instead become, is chosen as, a killing ground, where we consume even life itself.

Let love continue, Scripture reminds us, and be not forgetful to entertain strangers, for thereby some have entertained angels unawares.

Or perhaps, more simply, we must instead echo Joshua’s vow in Canaan land: As for me and my house, we will serve the LORD.

Brian Kennedy is the founder of Lydwine, as well as the frontman and principal songwriter of the arthouse country band The Cimarron Kings. He lives with his wife and six children in Guthrie, Oklahoma.

NOTES. “Goodbye Home” performed by the Cimarron Kings, words and music by Brian Kennedy; recorded in Stillwater and Guthrie, Oklahoma, August-October 2025; vocals, guitar, harmonica, and percussion by Brian Kennedy; bass and guitar by Jonathan Hunt; piano by Gabriel Van Ness; produced and engineered by Jonathan Hunt - Public domain 16mm footage from the David Ross Brower Motion Picture Collection, contributed by UC Berkeley’s Bancroft Library to the archives of California Revealed - details on medication abortion from Carolina Abboud’s “The Development of Mifepristone for Use in Medication Abortions” published in Arizona State University’s Embryo Project Encyclopedia, August 2017 - on the personalities and politics involved in the development of mifepristone, see “The Father of the Abortion Pill” published in the New York Times in January 2023, and also that newspaper’s obituary for Étienne-Émile Baulieu, published in May 2025 - testimonial for medication abortion quoted from Emma Specter’s “What Is It Like to Have a Medication Abortion? 5 People Share Their Stories” published in Vogue.com, November 2022 - Matthew 7:26-27 - Matthew 12:25 - Hebrews 13:1-2 - Joshua 24:15.

In the late nineteenth century, despite having never travelled to the American West, the German writer Karl May published a series of novels celebrating the pulse-pounding frontier exploits of his alter ego, the adventurer Old Shatterhand, and that Völkisch rifleman’s blood brother and bosom friend, a chief of the Mescalero Apache called Winnetou, or ‘Burning Water.’

Still popular in Germany to this day, May’s books were especially enjoyed by Adolf Hitler himself, who as a boy “read [May] by candle-light, or by moonlight with the help of a huge magnifying glass,” and who as newly appointed Reichskanzler revisited the writer’s extensive corpus, and even “had a special shelf built in his library to hold, in a place of honor, the results of May’s prolific pen, specially bound in vellum.”

Like many Westerns, May’s stories blend fact and fable in uncertain measure, claiming strict resemblance whilst aiming primarily for total effect, and for an American audience the German’s reveries of the West are most charming when most obviously mistaken: with gangs of lumberjacks roaming the Great Plains, or Colorado renowned for the quality of its maple syrup. The West is a landscape both actual and imagined, has always been so, and its inconsistencies and outright fantasies are not confined to foreign observers only. Consider the novelist John Steinbeck, whose descriptions of Depression-era Oklahoma in The Grapes of Wrath are as geographically suspect as anything found in the pages of Karl May. The film adaptation of Steinbeck’s novel was another special favorite of der Führer, who screened The Grapes of Wrath repeatedly for his wartime entourage, and between Karl May and John Ford descried some provisional sense of America’s national character, which Hitler found wanting: calling us “a mongrel nation… a half judaized and negrified society,” thereafter making the monumentally short-sighted mistake of declaring war against a realm which, by the time of his suicide in Berlin in 1945, was contributing fully half of the world’s entire industrial capacity.

So it is then no small irony that in Oklahoma City, of all familiar places, tucked among the beauty shops and dollar stores, the funeral homes and cannabis dispensaries, is a small museum housing in its peculiar collection the world’s largest public display of Adolf Hitler’s personal effects, rescued from oblivion by the soldiers of the U.S. Army’s 45th Infantry Division — the Thunderbirds — in their conquest of Germany toward the end of the war: Hitler’s stationery; his monogrammed linens and silverware; a wooden tabernacle for storing foreign translations of Mein Kampf; a black wool cloak with a velvet collar, the bottom hem of which suggests it was worn for a time by an unsuspecting Oklahoma housewife before being donated to the museum.

But also Hitler’s own lavatory mirror, plundered from the Götterdämmerung of the dictator’s bunker in Berlin by an American of the OSS, a grandchild of pioneers from the Oklahoma Land Run, and so himself a true son of the West. Oval-shaped, in a cream-colored frame, and completely innocuous, but if you stand before its glass — stand with your family, your children’s faces so much like the ghost of your own; your wife’s eyes, warm and worn, intimate — you cannot help but fret whether his likeness might also still lurk within the frame, that mustachioed cipher whose carefully tended grievances drove millions to their doom, corpses clawed from Abraham’s promise, multiplying as the sands of the seashore or the stars of heaven.

here in this carload
i am eve
with abel my son
if you see my other son
cain son of man
tell him that i

Visitors often taken selfies in Hitler’s mirror, the docent explained, shaking his head in wonder — at the enduring foolishness of humankind, blithe when offered the burden of its dead.

“There is something monstrous about mirrors,” Borges warned, suggesting that in our manifold efforts at expression and understanding — the slow plod of words, sentence upon sentence — we eye each instance of the real not in isolation but rather in reflection, as loci of illimitable connection, dilations of the simple substance of Being, and in doing so call to heart and mind not intellectual abstractions — flowers torn from their root — but instead in vivid sensual fashion what one Dominican called “the shades of likenesses among things,” that unknown, unseen visage uniting soil and blossom, the knower and the known.

In the 1960s, in the early years of the pro-life movement, it was commonplace among Catholics encountering the burgeoning spectacle of abortion-on-demand to appeal to Scripture for an appropriate likeness — to Herod’s slaughter of the innocents — though such rhetoric was later downplayed in deference to new allies in the movement with less graphic and full-Gospel sensibilities. Common as well were comparisons to the still-recent World War, to the ‘life unworthy of life’ cruelly selected for extermination in Nazi-occupied Europe, and while there are many relevant points to that comparison, one significant sense in which abortion differs from the Holocaust is that in the latter, the full industrial power of the state was brought to bear, in savagery, upon the innocent. Death in the Third Reich was a matter of policy, not preference.

In contrast, abortion in America flows not from the power of the state, but instead from the marketplace. Consider in this regard the rise of the free-standing clinic in the years after Roe v. Wade, when hospitals were unable or unwilling to meet the demand for elective abortion, and so were crowded out of this grisly business by that most American of activities — competition, gathering the steady drip of death, with tens of millions of women walking themselves to the butcher’s table, that dark altar of choice.

Consider also, in recent years, the fading of those same free-standing clinics, not in the face of protest, but in response to the market pressure brought by telemedicine, and abortion medication shipped directly to the home.

“Suffering is not increased by numbers,” Graham Greene wrote, “one body can contain all the suffering the world can feel.” Ultimately, likening abortion to that most monstrous of human endeavors — Adolf Hitler’s Babel of Death — might seem justified, might even be accurate in certain respects, but still remains rhetorically misguided. As practical language, it alienates, it does not enrich. Neither, in an American context, do comparisons with chattel slavery, for much the same reason — though when that likeness is tossed casually in conversation, I’m reminded our question of slavery was settled finally, after two-and-a-half centuries, only by war and conquest, and the death of fully two percent of the nation’s population.

But comparisons abound, nonetheless. In Oklahoma, here on the southern plains, where the payday loan and vape shops cluster like scabs atop the torn flesh of the prairie, and where one might contemplate complicity in the glass of Adolf Hitler’s own mirror, the unborn dead often call to mind the slow and bloody taming of the West, both actual and imagined: of whole nations displaced; of buffalo runners and bone pickers clawing from the womb of the land what the Kiowa called the sun’s own shadow; and then, with the Indians fenced and the buffalo gone, the tearing from the ground of the grass itself for greed’s sake, for wheat at $2 a bushel, until all the grass was gone, as was the cash, and the land withered and turned to dust, with the vault of heaven dry.

The songwriter Woody Guthrie was only twenty-two years old when he lived through the worst of the Dust Bowl’s so-called black blizzards, on Palm Sunday 1935:

“I remember the particular evening of April 14, 1935, that this dust storm here blowed up. I was standin’, a whole bunch of us was standin’, just outside of this little town... And so we watched the dust storm come up like the Red Sea closin’ in on the Israel children and anyway, we stood there and watched the son of a gun come up and I am a-tellin’ you that it got so black when that thing hit, we all run into the house and all of the neighbors had all congregated in different houses round over the neighborhood and around over town and we sat there in a little old room and it got so dark that you couldn’t see your hand before your face. You couldn’t see anybody in the room… So, we got to talkin’, ya know, and uh, a lot of people in the crowd that was religious-minded and they was up pretty well on the scriptures, they said, ‘Well, boys, girls, friends, and relatives, this is the end. The human race ain’t been treatin’ each other right and robbin’ each other in different ways, with fountain pens, guns, and havin’ wars and killin’ each other and shootin’ round. So, the feller that made this world, he’s worked up this dust storm and there has never been anything like it in the whole history of the world.’”

Black Sunday came and went — an oracle of judgment for the New World as undeniable as anything yet unfolded in the precincts of the Old — and though some communities on the southern plains reported record church attendance at Easter services the following Sunday, eventually the rains returned and the dust settled. Americans, flush on victory in foreign wars, forgot the sting of judgment and so relaxed again into their sins.

“For the love of money is the root of all evil,” counseled Saint Paul, “which while some coveted after, they have erred from the faith, and pierced themselves through with many sorrows.”

The Apostle also cautioned that “for now, we see through a glass, darkly” — whom might we witness then, in the mirror’s frame, when confronted face to face? Or has the darkness settled over us completely, to blot out sight and sun?

What Götterdämmerung do we ourselves again invite?

So long, it’s been good to know ya
So long, it’s been good to know ya
So long, it’s been good to know ya
This dusty old dust is a-gettin’ my home,
And I got to be driftin’ along.

Brian Kennedy is the founder of Lydwine, as well as the frontman and principal songwriter of the arthouse country band The Cimarron Kings. He lives with his wife and six children in Guthrie, Oklahoma.

NOTES. Miklós Radnóti’s “Guard and Protect Me” and Dan Pagis’s “Written in Pencil in the Sealed Railway-Car” in Art from the Ashes: A Holocaust Anthology, (Oxford University Press, 1995) edited by Lawrence L. Langer - for Karl May, see Blake Allmendinger’s Geographic Personas: Self-Transformation and Performance in the American West (University Nebraska Press, 1991) and also A. Dana Weber’s Blood Brothers and Peace Pipes: Performing the Wild West in German Festivals (University of Nebraska Press, 2019) - for Hitler’s love of Karl May see Robert G.L. Waite’s The Psychopathic God: Adolf Hitler (Basic Books, 1977) - for Hitler’s views on the United States, see Klaus P. Fischer’s Hitler and America (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011) - Genesis 22:17 - Jorge Luis Borges quoted from “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbus Tertius,” (1940) translated by Andrew Hurley - Fr. Thomas Joseph White, O.P. - Matthew 2:16-18 - for the rise of the free-standing abortion clinic, as well as the early rhetoric of the pro-life movement, see Daniel K. Williams’s Defenders of the Unborn: The Pro-Life Movement before Roe v. Wade (Oxford University Press, 2016) - Graham Greene quoted from The Quiet American (William Heinemann, 1955) - for the horrors of the Dust Bowl see Donald Worster’s Dust Bowl: The Southern Plains in the 1930s (Oxford University Press, 1979) and also Timothy Egan’s The Worst Hard Time: The Untold Story of Those Who Survived the Great American Dust Bowl (Houghton Mifflin, 2006) - Woody Guthrie’s ballad “Dusty Old Dust (So Long, It’s Been Good to Know You)” was first recorded at Victor studios in Camden, New Jersey on April 26, 1940.

N.B. — For four months I’ve struggled to finish part two of these reflections. While I still think it necessary to suggest the dead as restless, in need of voice, I no longer find that suggestion clever: it hasn’t been pleasant, waiting for the dead to speak. As these notes propose, the only offering commensurate with our age of abortion is the Cross, shouldering the burden of which, in the call of discipleship, is almost never graceful. Never have I felt more deeply my own limitations. I remain grateful to the supporters of this journal, for their patience and generosity throughout, even in the midst of indecision and gloom.

“…the life of all flesh is in the blood.”
- Leviticus 17:4

These are songs of resurrection, songs for the dead. I think I’ve heard them in some fashion ever since I was a boy.

In the Passion narratives of the Synoptic Gospels — Matthew, Mark, and Luke — each evangelist records, along the Way of the Cross, how a passerby, Simon of Cyrene, was forced by the Romans to shoulder the Lord’s own intolerable burden, that “dead tree to bear the dead world’s fruit.” Conceivably a Jewish pilgrim from North Africa, from a city said to have been founded by command of the Pythian Apollo, god of prophecy and plague, the Cyrenean passes out of Scripture as quickly as he appears. Both Matthew and Mark deftly characterize him as a man waylaid by Providence, innocently “coming from the country” on that day of woe; while the latter offers also Simon as “the father of Alexander and Rufus,” those two sons presumably known to the gospel’s original audience of Roman Christians, with one even greeted by name in Paul’s letter to the beleaguered faithful of the Eternal City.

In the lacunae of Scripture, beyond all hope of memory, are entire lives — as real as yours or mine — upended by Divine Love. For Simon of Cyrene, a participant briefly noted at the crux of celestial sacrifice, his afterward as witness went unrecorded. As with any man, it might well have been — even as a new age dawned and a new inheritance was gathered — merely some denouement in the pity of remembrance: “I have seen the whole world’s sorrow in one man’s eyes.” Or, as the implications of that glance unfolded, as blood and death gave way to resurrection, to a cloud of witnesses startled from complacency into the fulness of sacred possibility, likely the old Simon gave way to an entirely new man, even as a father and a husband, enduring something like what the poet Rilke would later write after encountering other, lesser forms:

                           ...for here there is no place
that does not see you. You must change your life.

Laboring under the burden of the Cross, as did Simon and as we are also called, invites conversion, demands metamorphosis, not simply or even primarily as a moral proposition, a matter of doing good or being good, but instead as a reckoning at the very root of identity: the grain of wheat after its fall emerging as a green shoot, uncurling as a miracle from the womb of the grave.

Which is to say that ultimately, as a believer, as a child of God, I long for what the world can never give — and so as an artist in this age of abortion I can offer only, in good conscience, what the world will never accept.

“When my older sister was seven, I was five, and my baby sister was two, we lived with our parents in one big room in Pittsburgh. When our mother, who was 28 years old at the time, got pregnant for the fourth time, there simply wasn’t room for another child, so our dad went to the drugstore and got some medicine. I don’t know what it was, but she took it. Later, she started hemorrhaging so he took her to the hospital. She lived for a few days, but one night, Dad came home and was crying and said that our mother was dead. I remember seeing her laid out in the living room of my aunt’s house. We just couldn’t understand why it had happened. In the months after her death, our father drank heavily and had a hard time holding down a job. There was no money, so he sent us to an orphanage. The building was on the top of a high hill, and every day for seven years, my sisters and I looked down the hill, waiting for Dad to come visit us. He came, but only about every six months.”

When I was a boy, barely six years old, a woman tried to take me, tried to steal me right off the street, a block away from my elementary school. This was in the empennage of 1983, during those salad days of the Reagan administration, the year Karen Carpenter and Dennis Wilson died, and our Marines in Beirut were killed by a suicide truck bomb. My parents were already divorced by then, my father was elsewhere, so instead of riding home on the school bus to an empty house after first grade classes ended, I ambled alone to a nearby day care, lingering there each weekday afternoon with the other little children until my mother got off work.

The day care was tucked into the basement level of a three-story building built into a hillside, with a dentist’s office at street level, adjacent to a hardware store, and across from an old wooden church. To get inside I had to leave the street and follow along an alley sloping down toward the back of the building, where a tall picket fence opened onto a spacious playground, with swings and a slide, and room to run. I liked going there after school because it was familiar, and because as a boy I only liked people and places that were familiar, when this woman, a stranger, approached at the mouth of the alley and tried to welcome me into her car, leaning across the front seat, beckoning through the passenger side window, I simply ignored her and kept walking.

I don’t remember any panic about the encounter, at least initially. I can’t recall any urgency on my part to tell someone what happened. But I do know that later that evening I mentioned the woman offhandedly to my older brother, who began asking questions, gently — what did she look like? what color was her car? what color was her hair? — details he afterward shared with our mother, quietly. She came to our school the next morning to speak with the principal, who summoned the police.

They questioned me in the principal’s office. I was terrified, I started crying. I thought I’d done something wrong. The woman was never caught. I seem to recall hearing at some point about other children being approached by this furtive stranger, but that might have only been a rumor, or wishful thinking.

Rural New Hampshire as it was in my childhood seems now by and large a world impossible, a faded realm of nostalgia, of cliché, with its trundling station wagons, S&H Green Stamps, and rotary telephones bolted to the kitchen wall. Families seldom bothered then even to lock their doors, and thought nothing of letting little children wander. In those seemingly halcyon days, I wasn’t neglected in having to walk alone to day care, at least not in that regard. Our entire town never had much more than a couple thousand people, and in all respects — especially in its insularity against tides of woe surging elsewhere — the North Country seemed a throwback to an earlier, simpler time. So innocent in fact that even after my encounter with that woman in the car, I think I still continued to walk myself to day care each afternoon once classes ended. For who would’ve escorted me, otherwise? My mother was working, my father was elsewhere, and my older brother was in the crucible of junior high, presumably caught up in other concerns.

But every road leads to ruin eventually, even a country road seldom traveled. Wasn’t it Hemingway who counseled that all human stories are bound in the end to death, if told in their entirety? A year later came the first of the faces of missing children on our milk cartons, and a two-part episode of a favorite television program told of a boy kidnapped from a grocery store as replacement for a grieving family’s own lost child. “If you try to run away,” the kidnapper told the frightened kid, “I’ll kill your parents.”

To steal a child off the street is to hunger for something so badly as to eclipse all possibility of satisfaction. It was only years later I thought to consider how close I came to death, or worse. To wonder ‘what if?’ but also, ‘why?’

At some point in those same salad days my older brother brought home a battered acoustic guitar. He found it in a neighbor’s attic, broken, and tried to glue the cracked bridge back in place. The guitar was for me, my brother explained, but I couldn’t touch it, not yet. I had to wait for the glue to set.

He left the guitar leaned in a corner. I sat and waited, fascinated, overcome. I wanted to handle it, to hold it, to master its secrets, of which I was sure there were legion. Ultimately, I couldn’t contain myself. I reached out and gently brushed the strings. The glue failed. The bridge came loose with a jangle of steel, a sting of disappointment.

I had to wait years for another chance at a first guitar.

“The first time this anarcha-feminist got pregnant, she also got a little confused. I knew that I didn’t want to be pregnant. But I also knew that I didn’t want to a pay a wealthy, white, male doctor to perform an invasive and traumatic abortion procedure on me. I wanted to experience my abortion as an empowering event in my life rather than a shameful mistake, and I wanted to actually experience my abortion. I wanted a menstrual extraction — the least physically traumatic, least expensive, and, unfortunately, least legal form of early-term abortion that exists today.

“For those of us unhappy with inviting chemicals or surgery into the abortion scene, menstrual extraction is an alternative option that can be safe, effective, and cheap. Developed in 1970 by feminist activists as an alternative to back-alley abortions, this underground technique has a rich revolutionary history that has somehow remained disappointingly absent from the struggle to reclaim reproductive rights... The technique itself is shockingly simple, requiring equipment that can be found in a home kitchen and a scientific supply store for under $100… In a time when 87 percent of counties in the U.S. lack an abortion provider, according to the National Abortion Federation, menstrual extraction has the potential to provide low-cost, early-term abortions across geographical, cultural, and economic borders. But why hasn't anyone heard of it?”

Americans are by and large a practical people, with great success in reshaping the world’s intractable mysteries into measurable results. Consider how the open diabolism of the Third Reich was overcome by the hard logic of our industrial capacity; or the sublimity of the moonshot guaranteed by the work of precision trajectories and transponders alone. But in this same proclivity towards success through can-do and know-how slumbers also the rudiments of our every undoing, in what one foreign observer noted as that “American penchant for obscuring an issue by simplifying it beyond belief.”

Witness how the 1960s, that “dramatic, near-catastrophic, outright spooky decade,” unraveled in the grip of America’s involvement in Vietnam, as our leaders, focused on dominoes and body counts and international credibility, nearly ran the ship of state aground on the sholes of the incalculable, the ungovernable, as though victory might be secured through metrics alone, without a grim awakening of the will. Never able to resolve to our satisfaction that ruthless tension, in January 1973 the United States retreated instead to euphemism, to “peace with honor,” as though the war, with its maimed and dead, its generational undoing, was little more than a minor traffic accident, one from which all parties might walk away — unscathed, unburdened, admitting neither defeat nor blame — after exchanging appropriate insurance information.

“The attempt at total control does not merely corrupt,” Garry Wills remarked, puzzling over the hubris of the era, “it debilitates. It undoes itself.” The heartbreak in such hubris is oftentimes its only reward. In one of history’s terrible ironies, that same week in January 1973 when the Nixon administration announced the Paris Peace Accords, ending the nation’s military involvement in Vietnam, the United States Supreme Court handed down its decision on abortion in Roe v. Wade — as though we the people could only end one folly if already pledged in pursuit of another, for continuity’s sake.

After two decades of war in Vietnam, America reckoned just over 58,000 dead. In the year after Roe v. Wade, in New York state alone — a jurisdiction at the forefront of abortion liberalization in the early 1970s — there were recorded nearly 200,000 abortions, this number itself a drop from the previous year, as the court’s decision meant women no longer need travel into New York from out of state for abortion access, able to terminate their pregnancies now closer to home. A decade later, by the end of 1983 — that year I was nearly kidnapped, in the salad days of the Reagan administration, when innocence was merely blindness — the United States suffered over 1.5 million abortions annually, over fourteen million in total since Roe, with no end in sight, even still.

The agonizing reality of such numbers is that they defy, nearly unconditionally, any practical solution — instead, they beg to be swallowed whole, like Jonah in the whale.

“Last night I knew you existed: a drop of life escaped from nothingness. I was lying, my eyes wide open in the darkness, and all at once I was certain you were there. You existed. It was as if a bullet had struck me. My heart stopped. And when it began to pound again, in gun bursts of wonder, I had the feeling I had been flung into a well so deep that everything was unsure and terrifying. Now I am locked in fear that soaks my face, my hair, my thoughts. I am lost in it. It is not fear of others. I don’t care about others. It’s not fear of God. I don’t believe in God. It’s not fear of pain. I have no fear of pain. It is fear of you, of the circumstance that has wrenched you out of nothingness to attach yourself to my body. I was never eager to welcome you, even though I’ve known for some time you might exist someday. In that sense I have long awaited you. But still I’ve always asked myself the terrible question: What if you don’t want to be born? What if someday you were to cry out to reproach me, ‘Who asked you to bring me into the world, why did you bring me into it, why?’ Life is such an effort, Child. It’s a war that is renewed each day, and its moments of joy are brief parentheses for which you pay a cruel price. How could I know that it wouldn’t be better to throw you away? How could I tell that you wouldn’t rather be returned to the silence? You cannot speak to me; your drop of life is only a cluster of cells that has scarcely begun. Perhaps it’s not even life, only mere possibility of life. I wish that you could help me with even a nod, a slight sign. My mother claims that I gave her such a sign, and that was the reason she brought me into the world.

“You see, my mother didn’t want me. I was begun in a moment of other people’s carelessness. And hoping I wouldn’t be born, she dissolved some medicine in a glass of water each night. Then, weeping, she drank it. She drank it faithfully until the night I moved inside her belly and gave her a kick to tell her not to throw me away. She was lifting the glass to her lips when I signaled. She turned it upside down immediately and spilled the fluid out. Some months later I was lolling victoriously in the sun.”

As they march into the darkness of an undiscovered country, what do the dead leave behind? What are their traces?

For even if abortion were disallowed tomorrow, we would still need to account for the lost, still want to weigh the burden of the past, still hope to temper somehow within our body politic those appetites, foul and full of woe, beyond all possibility of satisfaction.

What manner of God entreats us, with whom all flesh is grass?

What have you done?
   The voice of your brother's blood
cries to me from the ground...

In our age of abortion, to embrace the personhood of the unborn is to embrace foremost their vulnerability, their helplessness, and to allow that solidarity to inform our own failure to stem in some permanent fashion the steady march of death. Politics and jurisprudence; education and good works; protest and civil disobedience; even terrorism and outright violence — all have fallen short, have missed their mark. In the first full calendar year after the Dobbs decision overturned Roe v. Wade, America reckoned over one million abortions for the first time in over a decade. The shadows lengthen, even still.

Such helplessness in the face of anguish can debilitate, can enervate, can drive some even toward the consolations of folly and impotent spectacle. Consider those poor hippies, Yippies, and Fugs who in October 1967 hoped to end the war in Vietnam by levitating and exorcising the Pentagon, the nation’s very heart of darkness, but who failed in their quest, having been unable to secure the necessary permits for a magical encirclement, the heartbreak once again its own and only reward.

But as believers, as children of God who ultimately long for what the world can never give, we are not without hope: not abandoned in our anguish, nor left without an Advocate. Yet our acceptance of the grace offered to us is predicated on our own utter failure at bridging the gap, our absolute heartbreak; on reckoning as the only true politics of catastrophe the politics of the Cross — and so no true politics at all, but rather something more sublime, more mysterious. Not another painted skull, another work of man, but rather the form of the Crucified, Himself at home in a valley of bones.

“Why do we Christians complain about the way the world acts,” Jacques Ellul wrote, “when it depends on us whether the world is set before the Savior’s Cross?”

I remember standing on the sidewalk as a boy, watching that strange woman beckon me toward her car, the way of all flesh pressing upon us both, an education in vulnerability. My own shallow innocence, and her thirst for the tears of the weak. A solidarity in helplessness, each of us longing unsuspecting to be reborn from the womb of the grave, wherein might be reconciled through blood and judgment both tormentor and victim, both mother and murdered child.

When Simon of Cyrene, father of Alexander and Rufus, stumbled into the Way of Sorrows on that day of woe, coming from the country, he became the first of us to bathe in that “sprinkling of blood which speaks better than Abel,” that new song luring into consonance the clamor of Cain and his children; a murder song become a song of resurrection.

An offering, then, efficacious for its task.

When the Bridegroom cometh, 
   will your robes be white, 
   pure and white in the blood of the Lamb? 
Will your soul be ready 
   for the mansions bright, 
   and be washed in the blood of the Lamb?

I have heard those separate voices mingle. I long to sing with the dead.

- SS. Cornelius & Cyprian, 2025

Brian Kennedy is the founder of Lydwine, as well as the frontman and principal songwriter of the arthouse country band The Cimarron Kings. He lives with his wife and six children in Guthrie, Oklahoma.

NOTES. For Simon of Cyrene, see Matthew 27:32, Mark 15:21, Luke 23:26, Romans 11:13, but also Ridgely Torrence’s play on Simon in Plays for a Negro Theatre, Macmillan, 1917 - Rainer Maria Rilke quoted from “Archaic Torso of Apollo,” (1908) translated by Stephen Mitchell - “When my older sister was seven…” quoted from Free to Choose: A Women’s Guide to Reproductive Freedom, Eberhardt Press, 2013 - “The first time this anarcha-feminist got pregnant…” quoted from Laurel Hara, “Reproductive Self-Care: Menstrual Extraction,” in Clamor: The Revolution of Everyday Life, Nov/Dec 2005 - Foreign observer is John Gray, in the preface to his playscript for Billy Bishop Goes to War, Talonbooks, 1981 - the 1960s as a spooky decade is from Norman Mailer’s account of the Apollo 11 mission, Of a Fire on the Moon, first serialized in Life magazine in 1969 and 1970 - Garry Wills quoted from The Kennedy Imprisonment: A Meditation on Power, Atlantic Monthly Press, 1982 - “Abortions, Legal for Year, Performed for Thousands,” detailing abortion rates in New York State, appeared on page 14 of The New York Times, December 31, 1973 - “Trends in Abortions, 1982-1984” by Stanley K. Henshaw appeared in vol. 18, no. 1 of Family Planning Perspectives, published by the Guttmacher Institute, 1986 - “Last night I knew you existed…” quoted from Oriana Fallaci’s Letter to a Child Never Born, Anchor Books/Doubleday, 1978, translated by John Shepley - Genesis 4:10 - “Despite Bans, Number of Abortions in the United States Increased in 2023,” Guttmacher Institute, 2024 - Attempted levitation and exorcism of the Pentagon recounted at length in Norman Mailer’s The Armies of the Night, New American Library, 1968 - Jacques Ellul quoted from The Judgment of Jonah, William B. Eerdmans, 1971, translated by Geoffrey W. Bromiley - Hebrews 12:24 - Elisha Hoffman’s 1878 hymn “Are You Washed in the Blood?” was recorded by the Louvin Brothers, favorite singing group of Elvis Presley’s mother, on Halloween 1956 in Nashville, Tennessee.

“Now voices crying loud were heard at once —
the souls of infants wailing…”
- Virgil, Aeneid, Bk. VI

Certain stories demand an offering.

In the banquet hall of Alcinous, king of the Phaeacians, the hero Odysseus recounted for the royal assembly his passage to the nations of the dead, the cold home of woe. He sought there from sovereign Death counsel with the shade of blind Tiresias, the Theban prophet, pouring out upon the haunted ground generous libations of milk and honey, water and wine… but also black blood drained from the flesh of lamb and ram and ewe, a taste of which might give the dead a voice, and so secure for much-enduring Odysseus safe passage home.

When I first began this project — chronicling America in its age of abortion, those post-war decades when the practice emerged as mother tongue of the national imagination — I thought it clever to suggest the dead as restless, in need of voice. I imagined it would be easy, listening to them speak.

Instead I’m lost, stumbling in a valley of bones.

A voice was heard in Rama,
   weeping and loud lamentation;
Rachel weeping for her children,
   and she would not be comforted,
   because they are no more.

For over half a century, abortion has been the leading cause of death in the United States, yet never reckoned as such — never reckoned as death and so obscured. As though written in smoke. Always, I marvel at the scale of loss, and in its very midst, its rack and ruin, our still boundless faith in the nation’s better angels — come now, let us reason together — as though we could articulate across the cultural rift an actual politics of catastrophe, conjuring amity from opposition by force of will alone. “We must not be too prodigal with our angels,” Borges warned, “they are the last divinities we harbor, and they might fly away.”

In America in this age of abortion, we’re asked to tally raindrops as a tempest rages; taught to gather apples as the orchard burns. Death has undone the many, and left us reeling.

“I had my second abortion after I’d been living with a guy for two years. I missed a couple of pills and got knocked up. I must have done it on purpose. I really believe that. I love children, you know… I was old-fashioned enough with this guy to want to have his baby, but not admitting it to myself. I was really half-assed.

“He was very sensitive. He sort of wanted to have the baby too, but then he said I better have the abortion. So I did. I had a general anesthetic that time, which was much easier. Afterwards he drove me home and I felt rotten, all sick and depressed. I felt hot and feverish. I lay down on the bed and asked him for tea and the sympathy that went along with it. He was out of the room for forty-five minutes and I thought I was going to die for needing someone. I went out into the next room, and there he was just looking at the colors on the wall. Instead of getting me the tea, he had dropped acid.

“‘What happened?’ I said. ‘It’s been a hard day for me,’ he said. ‘A hard day for you?’ I said. ‘I was the one who went through it. You just had to sit in the waiting room.’ The little creep. I wanted arms around me and to be cuddled, and he thought he’d had a hard day. I went crazy.

“I started beating him up. I grabbed the lamp and shattered it on his back. Then I swung a baseball bat at him, but he got away. So I jumped on him and started beating him with my fists. I was bleeding all over the place and all over him. I beat the crap out of him. He ran out the door and I locked it behind him and shoved a chair under the knob to keep him out.”

Whole galaxies of grief, whirling through indifferent void, untutored by mercy.

But still… out here in Oklahoma, on the southern plains, in a small museum only an hour’s drive from our home, rests the oldest painted artifact in North America, a prehistoric bison skull — over ten thousand years old — delicately adorned with streaks of brilliant red hematite lightning. The Cooper Bison Skull was gathered in the summer of 1994 at an archaeological dig adjoining the Beaver River in northwest Oklahoma, in a gully where the animals were once trapped and slaughtered by our ancient countrymen in that impossibly antique time before the pyramids, before Moses or Pharaoh, before Odysseus sailed for Troy.

Perhaps this painted skull — found trapped between two seasons worth of bone, “repositioned to look straight down the arroyo in the direction of oncoming animals” — was objet d’art for some sort of magical reciprocity: red lightning calling the living bison to itself with thundering hooves. No one knows for sure. But consider that after the skull was unearthed, over five inches of unseasonable summer rain fell upon those dry and dusty bonebeds in northwest Oklahoma, as though the offering still had power, after ten thousand years, to call upon its trinity of storm: lightning, thunder, and rain. Consider also that once the skull was processed, and finally installed in that small museum only an hour’s drive from our home — that first night another Oklahoma thunderstorm passed directly overhead, the roof of the museum leaked, and again the painted skull was doused with rain. It still happens, they say, from time to time — curators needing to adjust the exhibit, to account for the skull’s peculiarities, its potency. An offering to outlast us all.

As artists, we should ideally strive for such genuine and self-transcending impact, daring to avoid what Steiner termed “the pornography of insignificance” — art devoid of any moral weight, and so useless for the thriving of the tribe. “If there is still one hellish, truly accursed thing in our time,” Antonin Artaud declared, “it is our artistic dallying with forms, instead of being like victims burnt at the stake, signaling through the flames.”

So again I suggest, without being clever, that in America the dead are restless. In this age of abortion, the underworld has overflowed its bounds. The scale of loss demands an offering, far beyond what we might gather from politics, or law, or even insurrection. The scale of loss demands a recognition. What happened? And why? How could a once great nation, in a dream of progress, devour its own children? Entrust itself to an ideology of violent desire?

“On abortion days Sarah would arrive early, preparing a supply of translucent plastic containers labelled with each patient’s name and last menstrual period date, as well as a cache of white mesh netting wound in channels and cut to length. Nested within each container, with one end attached to the suction and the other knotted shut, the length of mesh would gather the fetal remains vacuumed from the patient’s womb, while the mingled blood of mother and child would instead pass through and collect in the cup.

“Eventually, for her good work in the procedure room, the clinic administrator started asking Sarah to cover shifts in an adjacent room called POC — product of conception — into which each labelled container was passed once an abortion was completed. Here, Sarah would empty the fetal tissue onto a clear glass pie plate, then begin piecing the aborted child back together, accounting for the entirety of its remains, ensuring no portion of the fetus was left behind in the patient before she was allowed to leave the clinic. Sarah would see the skull, the spinal cord, the legs and arms — sometimes even all the fingers on a hand, perfectly formed. Once, while accounting for aborted twins, she thought of her own brothers, also twins, and marveled to herself that this is what the two must have looked like in the womb.”

But even history is not enough. Men and women have always sought to kill their children, but only in our time has abortion grown into a way of life, a culmination, a cult of unchecked grief and greed. In 2023, the first full calendar year after the Dobbs decision overturned Roe v. Wade, America reckoned over one million abortions for the first time in over a decade. Pro-life advocates speak of a growing hardness of heart, a troubling moral distance, in the pregnant women they try to counsel. The shadows lengthen.

“Herbal abortion is an extremely viable option but only when added to an already naturalistic view of the human body and reproductive system. You see, when a woman is ovulating (usually 7-14 days after your period), she [is] primed and ready for pregnancy. In fact, during ovulation our immune systems are almost always lower than in the rest of our cycle. This means that our bodies can’t recognize sperm — that sticky wet stuff — as a foreign and conspiring agent. So our bodies just allow the baby-causing army in as if it were no big deal. If you allow these squirmy intruders on your sexy and fertile soil they will set up shop and if they have it their way, you will be pregnant.

“So your soil has been invaded while your immune commanders were at lunch and now [you’re] fucking pregnant. Okay, what really sucks is that those little over the counter tests that we all love to steal are not going to give you reliable results until you’ve already missed your period. Herbal abortions are most effective when taken around the time that you would be receiving your next gift of flow. So if you wait for the test to confirm your suspicions you will have less time to act. So ladies be smart and keep tabs on that sexy and beautiful body. If you are pregnant your tits and belly will be swollen and warm, you’ll pee a lot, you may puke, you’ll probably be dizzy, and you will have bouts of fatigue that will pair themselves with spells of intense focus that border on euphoria. This euphoria can be attributed to a tell-tale sign of pregnancy… the ‘glow.’ Women glow when they are pregnant, I shit you not. So [you’re] pregnant and it is within the first eight weeks of your pregnancy, your fetus and its fate are yours; herbal abortion can personalize your experience.

“Okay, here’s what you do. Call your local abortion provider and set up an appointment, you can always cancel it silly!! Cancel! Cancel! Cancel! Now, breathe and find yourself someone that you love and trust who can provide support and strength through this herbal extravaganza. NOTE: this person may or may not be the father of your fetus. Remember hot stuff, for this herbal remedy to work you have to be at the end of your cycle because you cannot abort an egg before it has attached itself to your uterine wall. Wow, getting lots of Vitamin C and taking wild carrot seeds can help the sperm invaders from attaching to your sacred wall! Preventative Measures! Counter Attack! So here’s the recipe that has saved my ass from the waiting room and vacuum. Remember, herbs are not toxic, but if they can defeat your invaders and kill your fetus they are powerful things and not to be fucked with by the un-educated. Talk to you local herbalist and the health food store or get yourself a kick-ass field guide to herb harvesting and like I said earlier, have a back up plan!”

There is no middle path. The darkness will not stop until it swallows us whole.

An offering, then — efficacious for its task. For the comfort of the restless, in need of voice. For our voyage homeward. For the thriving of the tribe.

In his own embassy to the dead, the bard Orpheus, grieving, brought music to the dim and silent shores, startling the torments of the damned. “Tantalus tried no more to reach for the water,” Ovid relates, “And Sisyphus climbed on his rock to listen.” Even the Furies wept. With song, Orpheus rescued his bride Eurydice from the clutch of shadow, and though his nerve later failed, his music never wavered.

But still… in his Metamorphoses, Ovid records a curious and disconcerting detail about the fate of Orpheus — how after losing his bride a second time, the bard wandered alone for three entire years, despondent, rejecting the attention of adoring women. Instead, the poet relates, Orpheus found his comfort elsewhere:

                                             His love was given
To young boys only, and he told the Thracians
That was the better way: enjoy that springtime,
Take those first flowers!

Such a detail might seem wildly out of place in this discussion of American abortion — but it isn’t, I assure you. Instead it reminds me, in considering an offering, in considering this chronicle, just where I should begin.

- Sixth Sunday of Easter, 2025

Brian Kennedy is the founder of Lydwine, as well as the frontman and principal songwriter of the arthouse country band The Cimarron Kings. He lives with his wife and six children in Guthrie, Oklahoma.

NOTES. In both substance and style, this piece draws heavily on Robert Fitzgerald’s translations of Bk. VI of The Aeneid and Bks. X and XI of The Odyssey in their Vintage Classics Editions, 1990 - Matthew 2:18 - Jeremiah 31:15 - Isaiah 1:18 - Jorge Luis Borges quoted from “A History of Angels,” (1926) translated by Esther Allen - “I had my second abortion…” quoted from Linda Bird Francke’s The Ambivalence of Abortion, Random House, 1978 - For the Cooper Bison skull, see Leland Bement’s Bison Hunting at Cooper Site: Where Lightning Bolts Drew Thundering Herds, Oklahoma University Press, 1999 - George Steiner quoted from his Real Presences, University of Chicago Press, 1989 - Antonin Artaud quoted from The Theatre and Its Double, translated by Mary Caroline Richards, Grove Press, 1958 - “On abortion days Sarah would arrive early…” quoted from Lydwine’s profile of former abortion clinic worker Sarah Eubanks - “Despite Bans, Number of Abortions in the United States Increased in 2023” (Guttmacher Institute, 2024) - Manifesto for the joys of herbal abortion quoted from D.I.Y Guide II, CrimethInc., 2012 - Ovid’s Metamorphoses translated by Rolfe Humphries, Indiana University Press, 1955.

“Believe me, I do not want to destroy your home.” Claibourne’s voice was quiet, firm. “Sign these papers and we’ll ride on our way.”

“I will not, sir.”

The old man facing him had white hair, but stood straight, his gray eyes strong as steel. Behind the old man huddled the women — his daughters, daughters-in-law, granddaughters — their pretty faces washed with worry. Behind the women stood the slaves, dark faces trained to hide their feelings. Yet Claibourne felt fear there.

He tried once more.

“You must realize that your slaves will be freed whether you sign or not. It can’t be avoided.”

Hate sparked the old man’s eyes.

“Sir, you may take my slaves. You may wantonly destroy all I have. You will not force me to agree to what should not be.”

Claibourne kept his eyes on the old man’s eyes.

“All right,” he said. “Lieutenant.” He was aware of the junior officer stepping up beside him. He felt a pain in his chest. “Have the men put torches to the house.”

He forced himself to watch as soldiers silently placed fire against the wooden porch, the white wooden walls. Then his eyes moved to the old man, standing straight and silent, to the women, weeping, crying out. Then beyond, to the slaves, whose expressionless faces were frozen in shocked firelight.

“My God,” he thought. “They’re terrified of being free.”

He heard the lieutenant tell him they were ready, heard the order to mount, mechanically stepped toward his own horse, which had been led up by an orderly.

Smoke rose above the subdivision as Claibourne and his men rode next door to another plantation house, where the owner, his family and slaves stood in the driveway, huddling against their silver gray Cadillac.

TWO. That was after years of being underground. Quite literally, sometimes, Claibourne and the other members of the resistance had lived like caved creatures in basements, glad for the safety they were provided. Like the time, operating out of the Starlight Bar and Grill, they planted stink bombs in upper middle class houses and had been hunted half the yellow moonlit night through back yards and over fences, fear gripping them until they found a large gopher hole of safety. The earth had taken them in, nurtured them, saved them for another hour.

That hour was in Cambodia, a night long before they were to ride out in strength. Claibourne and one companion were hidden in the jungle beside a road. Down the road passed a long line of peasants guarded by a handful of soldiers. The peasants were from a village that had taken the wrong political position, and they were starving. Claibourne held food in his hand.

Patiently Claibourne and his companion waited. Claibourne could feel sweat trickling down the inside of his shirt; mosquitoes buzzed in his ears. He was absolutely still, waiting for the right moment. Suddenly he whispered, “Now.”

An old peasant had come abreast of them. Claibourne could not tell whether the peasant was a man or a woman. He/she was tall, with high cheek bones and a long jaundiced face, and when Claibourne whispered, he/she turned toward them large, luminous, eyes, round like moons under which Claibourne had been hunted.

“Here,” Claibourne whispered, and he knew the peasant heard him. Claibourne reached out his hand. It held an immense amount of food, food for thousands, and his arm reached with astounding ease across yards of distance toward the peasant. The guards were not watching, the peasant had only to take the food. Claibourne looked deeply into the luminance of his/her eyes, then suddenly reeled back in amazement.

The peasant’s eyes were filled with terror at Claibourne’s kindness.

THREE. Moonlight shone over Claibourne’s shoulder onto the lock as he quietly jimmied it open. He heard a slight crack, and the door stood ajar.

“Ready?” whispered his companion.

“Ready.”

With gloved hands, he carefully opened the door, pulled out a large flashlight and switched it on. Quickly they made certain no one was in the room, then moved quietly around to the windows, pulling down the shades.

“Okay,” Claibourne said.

His companion touched the switch and light flooded the room, the sterile walls, basin, operating table.

“I’ll take the files,” his companion whispered. “The safe is behind the screen.”

Claibourne stepped quickly toward the screen, then stopped, his eyes arrested by a large plastic trash barrel.

“What’s the matter?” his companion whispered.

“Nothing.”

In the barrel, nearly filling it, lay the discarded fetuses. The one on top was directly facing him, a girl, her eyes shut, her face intense yet impassive, so that Claibourne thought of a Chinese philosopher. He took off his gloves, reached out and picked her up in his two hands, surprised at how tiny she was. She was imprisoned in afterbirth, her body still soft, locked into death.

“Let’s get going.” His companion was beside him.

“All right,” Claibourne answered, but still he held the girl. He felt his heart pumping out through his arms, his hands, his fingers, a strange love, as though he could love life back into her.

“Come on.” His companion was impatient.

“I wonder if we opened her eyes.”

“Wonder what?”

“Whether they’d be scared,” Claibourne said.

FOUR. Once, for purposes of cover, the resistance sent Claibourne to work for a distinguished Chicago law firm. His contact there was a partner, Mr. Hand, a thin hard-bitten litigator, fifty years old. Claibourne spent several months at the firm, working long hours, speaking quietly, wearing a three-piece suit.

One afternoon Mr. Hand called Claibourne to his office. When Claibourne arrived, the lawyer was standing behind his desk, hands in his pockets, looking out the window. Claibourne could see only Mr. Hand’s profile. The older man glanced at Claibourne briefly, turning back to the window before he spoke.

“The resistance wants you to cover the convention in Milwaukee,” Mr. Hand said. A moment later he turned toward Claibourne and, as though surprised to see him still there, said, “Well?”

“Nothing, Mr. Hand. Only, who do we support?”

“What?”

“Which candidate will enact the laws....”

Claibourne saw impatience flit across the lawyer’s face. Suddenly the room looked new, the polished wooden desk, the shelves of law books, the green carpet. Claibourne saw Mr. Hand looking out the window, and words came stumbling out of Claibourne’s mouth.

“I see now, Mr. Hand. I didn’t see before, but I see now.”

The older man remained looking out the window. Claibourne felt he had to explain.

“I know that laws won’t do it, Mr. Hand. I know now that they’ll stop killing when they see it’s an act against humanity, against all that’s civilized, against....”

His lips froze, terrified at the word “God.” Mr. Hand made no acknowledgment, did not move. Claibourne’s tongue forced more words through his lips, strange, stilted words like the echo of law books.

“I know that the answer to specific problems is not found in specifics. I feel the answer, like a huge dome over the world, simple as a puzzle in the newspaper if only one can see it.”

Mr. Hand did not turn, and Claibourne didn’t know whether the lawyer had heard him or if what he had said mattered. His words seemed to have been soundless, constructing crystal arches in the room. He was confused, happy.

The silence in the room was a friendly silence. Claibourne looked at his watch, then turned quietly and left for Milwaukee.

Arthur Powers went to Brazil in 1969 and lived most his adult life there. From 1985 to 1997, he and his wife served with the Franciscan Friars in the Amazon, doing pastoral work and organizing subsistence farmers and rural workers' unions in a region of violent land conflicts. The Powers currently live in Raleigh North Carolina.

Arthur received a Fellowship in Fiction from the Massachusetts Artists Foundation, three annual awards for short fiction from the Catholic Press Association, the 2008 Tom Howard Fiction Award (2nd place), the 2012 Tuscany Novella Prize, and the 2014 Catholic Arts & Literature Award. His poetry, fiction, and essays have appeared in many magazines & anthologies. He is the author of A Hero For The People: Stories From The Brazilian Backlands (Press 53, 2013), The Book of Jotham (Tuscany Press, 2013), Edgewater (Finishing Line Press, 2015), Sketches/Rio de Janeiro (Finishing Line Press, 2019), and Padre Raimundo's Army (Wiseblood Books, 2021). He judged the Tom Howard/John Reid Short Fiction & Essay Contest (2014-16) and Dappled Things J.F. Powers Fiction Contest (2015).

“When the Pope appeared in the sedia gestatoria, preceded by the Knights of Malta and a procession of cardinals and archbishops, the cowboys and the Indians bowed their heads, while the Sioux chief bent his knee and crossed himself. Leo XIII looked affectionately at these children of the American prairies and blessed them, not without some emotion. He also bestowed his blessing on Buffalo Bill, who bowed respectfully while he did so.”

- Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, April 12, 1890

Pitter’s work was appreciated by many of her contemporaries, and she enjoyed friendship and correspondence with C. S. Lewis. Her first collection of poetry was helped to publication by Hilaire Belloc.

Certain niche concerns may have a sense of one or another of her poems. She had poetry on cats and many poems observant of the natural world with a sensitivity like G. M. Hopkins. Among her gardening poems is “The Rude Potato,” comedic and better known because it implies something bawdy.

On the day the Church elected Pope Leo XIV, a Pitter poem came to mind:

The Plain Facts

See what a charming smile I bring,
Which no one can resist;
For I have found a wondrous thing –
The Fact that I exist.

And I have found another, which
I now proceed to tell.
The world is so sublimely rich
That you exist as well.

Fact One is lovely, so is Two,
But O the best is Three:
The Fact that I can smile at you,
And you can smile at me.

The new Pope smiled and bid peace to all. This Pope Leo is an Augustinian. Ruth Pitter’s final stanza of “The Plain Facts” capitalizes the words: One. Two, and Three. The fact of this capitalization points me to the Trinity: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Smiling, here, is the sign of love. St. Augustine in his work On the Trinity wrote:

And the Holy Spirit, according to the Holy Scriptures, is neither of the Father alone, nor of the Son alone, but of both; and so intimates to us a mutual love, wherewith the Father and the Son reciprocally love one another.

A smile given, received and reciprocated, a celebration of being, a bond. Too simple a place for a civilization to begin again? With God it can be powerful. This Augustinian Pope has a motto, tumblingly poetic: In Illo Uno Unum, a quote from St. Augustine’s On the Psalms, meaning, “in the One Christ we are one.”

The bond of love originates in God who has revealed himself in Christ, with a pleasing and kindly countenance, if we enter in. What can smiling Christians do? Bring to the world the only humanism worth having, the kind that hasn’t forgotten the wonder of our being together in Christ.

Gerald Coleman writes from Maryland.

“Within ‘the big top,’ as nowhere else on earth, is to be found Actuality. Living players play with living. There are no tears produced by onion-oil and Mr. Nevin's Rosary, no pasteboard hovels and papier-mâché palaces, no ‘cuts,’ ‘retakes,’ or ‘N. G.'s’ — and no curtain-calls after suicide. At positively every performance Death Himself lurks, glides, struts, breathes, is. Lest any agony be missing, a mob of clowns tumbles loudly in and out of that inconceivably sheer fabric of doom, whose beauty seems endangered by the spectator's least heart-beat or whisper…”

Left unspoken is the presence of Death Himself not only during performance, but afterward — and ultimately, always.

At Mount Olivet Cemetery in Hugo, Oklahoma, a small section of hallowed ground — called Showmen’s Rest — is set aside for the mortal remains of the circus folk who for generations have made tiny Hugo their winter haven. Buried there are impresarios like Jack Moore, who as a young man kept both a lion and a wrestling bear in his mother’s garage in Marshall, Texas; performers like Zefta Loyal, who could dance on pointe on the back of a galloping horse; or Herbert Weber, who as the Great Huberto walked the high wire with baskets on his feet.

“The circus,” wrote E.B. White, “comes as close to being the world in a microcosm as anything I know.” A world in which the sting of death comes quickly for some, yes, but slowly for most.

Popcorn the Clown, interred at Showmen’s Rest, before his death recalled a time when thirty or forty of his fellows might dress together in clown alley before performance, that special tent set aside for the clowns at the insistence of other, nobler performers — who didn’t wish to share a space with the painted fools of the circus ring.

Popcorn recalled as well that number steadily dwindling, year after year, until he alone was left.

Adjacent to the cemetery is Hugo’s elementary school, and so at times the sounds of children, sounds of delight, can still be heard, out there among the graves — a comfort to the departed, and those who stop to mourn.

The poet Robert Lax, who himself travelled for a time with the Cristiani Brothers Circus, penned what seems a fitting epitaph for the dead of Showmen’s Rest, and for those of us yet left behind, who marvel at their witness:

Our dreams have tamed the lions,
have made pathways in the jungle,
peaceful lakes; they have built new
Edens ever sweet and ever changing.
By day from town to town we carry
Eden in our tents and bring its won-
ders to the children who have lost
their dream of home.

While interviewing Vicki for Praise Her in the Gates she gave me (among other things) a pamphlet she’d written on “The Holy Spirit and the Gift of Tongues,” as well as a two hundred page typewritten memoir entitled Notes from Planned Parenthood and Other Places, chronicling some of her many adventures.

The full text of her pamphlet, as well as selections from the larger manuscript, are reprinted below with Vicki’s permission.

I have loved the Lord all my life. I have always prayed and felt His love. I was taught about the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, but recently, I have been called to a more personal relationship with Him than ever before: a fuller commitment. It is all new for me — a deeper walk. My walk with the Lord has gone from general to specific. Before, I prayed for people’s health. Now I pray for my child’s specific headache, and I see it healed right now. I pray in tongues at a prayer meeting — where two are three are gathered in the Name of the Lord (Matthew 18:20; 1 Corinthians 5:4) — and I receive a prophecy for people right now; or a specific vision; or a word of knowledge of wisdom which helps to direct the meeting or which leads to healing of someone’s body, mind or spirit.

This story happened [at the abortion clinic] at Sage and Eslava Creek. It was very hot that day. I had forgotten my water and when sidewalk counseling there I had to park down behind Women’s Resource Center on Sage Avenue. I didn’t want to leave my post even for a minute, so I walked back and forth, being very hot and thirsty. I started singing the song “Lord, let me walk that last hour with you under the weight of the cross” and I sang it over and over again. Finally the cars began to leave, and then the last young lady came out of the clinic. She came over to me and said, “I just couldn’t do it” and she started to cry. I told her that God was very pleased with her decision and asked if she needed help. She walked down to Women’s Resource Center — then called Save-A-Life. Back in those days, in the ‘80s, the women were mostly poor. Sometimes we would wonder how their vehicles made it into the parking lot. They would also be very upset about the prospect of having an abortion. Many, many changed their minds with little convincing.

The Lord loves us as we are. Yet the Lord wants us to grow always. As we grow, we move into new areas, closer to Him. This is what is spoken in the third chapter of Joel: “I will pour out My Spirit on all people. Your sons and daughters will prophesy. Your old men will dream dreams. Your young men will see visions. Even on My servants, both men and women, I will pour out My Spirit in those days.” (Joel 2:28-29)

When the Holy Spirit is strong, I see a purple color that comes from the sides and then shoots forward, like going to Heaven.

Praying in tongues is not really a reaction to the Holy Spirit. It is more: an act of our free will to submit to the Holy Spirit. It is a sign of His presence in us, that He is flowing through us. On the day of Pentecost: “They were filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in other tongues as the Spirit gave them.” (Acts 2:4) When Peter preached at Cornelius’ house: “the circumcised believers who had come with Peter were astonished that the gift of the Holy Spirit had been poured out even on the Gentiles, for they heard them speaking in tongues and praising God.” (Acts 10:45-46) In Acts 10:5-6: “When they heard this, they were baptized into the Name of the Lord, Jesus. And when Paul placed his hands on them, the Holy Spirit came on them and they spoke in tongues and prophesied.”

Met a lady, Nita, at Wal-Mart and offered her baby feet. (I had just been thinking that I was giving out too many baby feet because they were too expensive.) She had a 16 month old girl in the cart. She looked at me and told me that she had come to the abortion clinic 2 years prior to have an abortion, but I offered her a pamphlet about pro-life. She took the pamphlet but told me she was so angry that she cursed me as she left and then she drove around the block so she could curse me again. But she changed her mind and gave life to her baby. Now she loves her child so much and can’t imagine life without her. Praise the Lord. How I got to Wal-Mart: the Lord used my compulsive nature. I was making one last stop to buy special carrots for a friend. They didn’t have the special carrots, but I saw the lady and the baby, etc. It remind me of when Dennis was in high school and wanting medicine in the middle of the night. I went to get it (again my compulsive nature) and there was a lady who asked where the medicine was for her headache. I said, “[it’s] over there but let me pray for you.” The good Lord healed her headache and she asked where I went to church. As it turned out, she was Baptist and I, Catholic. I told her that we couldn’t have done this years ago because the religions didn’t mix much then. One never knows all the Lord has in mind when we go places.

We are told in Acts 2:38 that the gift of the Holy Spirit is for all of us. Mark 16:17 tells us that signs will follow the believers. One of these signs is that we will speak in new tongues. Romans 8:26 tells us: “we do no know what to pray for, but the Spirit intercedes for us with groans that words cannot express.” In his first letter to the Corinthians, Paul tells us that he spoke in tongues more than the rest of the people (14:18), that the gift of tongues helps the person grow spiritually (14:4), and that when we pray in tongues, we pray directly to God (14:2). When we pray in tongues, Paul also suggests that we should pray for the power to interpret them so that we can tell others afterwards plainly what was said (14:13-16). He also tells us not to forbid people to speak with tongues (14:39).

When I pass out the pro-life cards, I tell the person: this card shows you when you were inside your mom, when God was forming you in secret before you saw the light of day — and I tell them to look at Psalm 139, Jeremiah 1, and Psalm 49.

James 3:8 tells us the tongue cannot be tamed. Yet when we pray in tongues, the tongue is relinquished to God. In Ephesians 6:18, we are told to pray in the Spirit at all times. I find that when I pray in tongues all the time, my heart and mind go to the Lord. Then when I speak, I speak more often what the Lord would have me speak (see James 3:2).

Praying in tongues requires the most childlike attitude possible. It can seem and sound absolutely ridiculous. Satan will get in there and say that it is sheer folly. But I have learned that if I persist for an hour or two — even more — the light eventually breaks through and the love and power of God comes forth.

I left the Dollar Store and got in the car. A lady followed me to the car and handed me $20.00 through the window. She said she admired and appreciated what I did at [Planned Parenthood] and wanted to say thanks. I had about 2 cents to my name at that point so the $20.00 was really appreciated. She said I could use it for whatever I needed.

When I submit to the childlike act of praying in tongues, I am a willing slave to Him not only in the general direction of my life, but in each moment, each thought, each word, each prayer. I constantly pray and seek His will for each moment of the day: What next, Lord? Do I go here or there? How long do I stay? What do I say? I give up the pleasure of praying as I would like (although I do pray the Scriptures) totally submitting and praying in tongues.

An evangelist tells of a time when he prayed in tongues for five hours and felt nothing. He went to a prayer meeting, touched a girl and she was instantly healed.

Prayed for a woman’s hip. She said, “you put your hand on the wrong hip,” but God healed the correct hip anyway.

When I pray in my prayer closet in tongues for a period of time, people will suddenly come into my life, and I will be equipped to minister to them. As we pray in tongues, the Spirit also comes over the person we pray for — even if we don’t know who it is — and, when we meet, the power of God flows. The Holy Spirit knows the hearts of people. He knows who needs healing or growth, and who has a desire for these things. He simply touches our hearts, and as we yield to Him, we become an instrument so that the prayer can be answered.

Coming out of Waffle House, I heard someone say, “I like your hat,” so I turned around and it was a couple with the most beautiful blond-haired little baby boy. I offered them some baby feet and they said [they were] pro-life all the way. [Their] friend was raped and she kept her child though many tried to tell her to have an abortion. The child is [now] in her teens and recently something happened with her boyfriend and she ended up face down in a swimming pool. She is alive, though has some brain damage. The devil tried to end her life twice, but [she] is still here to fulfill the plan God has for life.

A beautiful healing team ministered for years, praying for 10,000 people, but only saw a few healed. Upon receiving the Baptism of the Holy Spirit — or yielding to the Holy Spirit — and praying in tongues, they saw thousands and thousands come to the Lord. People were also healed and delivered: cancer fell out onto the stage; demons fled from people; and many other wonderful miracles took place.

I was talking with a lady at a drug store. I offered her baby feet. She accepted them and then told me the sad story about her only child, a daughter, who had 3 abortions. She said, “I don’t have any grandchildren and I won’t ever have any because my daughter killed them and can’t have any more.” Her daughter had a hysterectomy.

Praying in tongues is an act of will. Make an initial sound in your throat — any sound, knowing and believing that it is going to the Father. Move your tongue freely in your mouth, as one would do when learning a foreign language. Then, like a baby, babble or imitate someone else, knowing the Father is pleased just as parents are pleased when a child learns to talk. The Holy Spirit takes over as we step out in childlike faith. He will form a language — or more, depending on the need. Our free will, submitted to the Father, is never taken away from us. We are told in Corinthians that one who has a gift of prophecy has control over his or her own spirit and can choose to speak of wait his turn (1 Corinthians 14:32). The more we pray, the more we feel the love and power of God upon us, and we see the gifts and spiritual fruits flow. Love and the peace that passes all understanding are the fruits that must always be present. Satan cannot masquerade these — not real love and not deep, abiding peace.

Note: with just about all these stories, I make a spur of the moment decision to go somewhere or do something. These things were not on my schedule for the day. Either God is prompting me to go, or He is making good use of my time when I do go. As long as the message is being spread about the Gospel and about pro-life, that is all that matters. People’s hearts are being touched. God knows where the people are who [are] ready to hear the Good News.

None of this is for our enjoyment. It is for the glory of God; for the building up of the Body of Christ; and for bringing many, many into the Kingdom of God.

A lady and her baby fell down the escalator. The police were there and the personnel from the store surrounded her and her 2 children. I managed to slip through an opening and say a prayer for her and her baby. A police officer said, “Thank you.”

The eyes of the Lord go to and fro, looking for people who will be really committed to Him (2 Chronicles 16:9); to walk in perfect obedience to Him (2 John 1:6); to intercede day and night, night and day (Luke 18:7; 1 Thessalonians 3:10, 5:17). It says in Mark 16:20: “Then the disciples went out and preached everywhere, and the Lord worked with them, and confirmed His Word by signs that accompanied it.” He tells us that if we look back once we put our hands tot he plow, we are not worthy of the kingdom of God (Luke 9:62). He wants to number us and know that He can count on us (Luke 14). He desires for us to use all the gifts to bring as many people as possible into the kingdom of God. We need to realize, considering the times, that as the Lord has told us: “My people perish for lack of knowledge,” (Job 36:12) and “where there is ignorance of God, crime runs wild: but what a wonderful things it is for a nation to know and keep His laws.” (Proverbs 29:10)

I helped one lady who was walking along the highway. She accepted the money I gave her, but she told me to be very careful in trying to help people. She said it a few times. “Just be careful,” she said.

The Lord loves us as we are. He never pushes us, though sometimes His servants are pushy. The Lord will lead and guide us because of our deep love and commitment. As we seek Him, we find Him. The Lord loves us unconditionally. He wants His people saved, healed, and filled with the power of the Holy Spirit. Intercession is needed now as never before (Ezekiel 1; Romans 8:22; 2 Corinthians 5:4a, 10:3). He needs our help to be “Jesus” on this earth.

Today we went to Waffle House. We were at different tables. I walked to see some friends that were at a different table. A lady came up to me and told me she knew me. Apparently her daughter tried to abort her baby through drugs and then through an abortion. The baby survived and was born. This child is perfectly beautiful and normal in every respect. The woman told me she had shared her story at a 40 Days [for Life] event. I needed to [hear] this today. Yesterday an abortion worker came and pulled right next to me across the street from [Planned Parenthood] and stayed there for several minutes. It disturbed me. I needed to hear a good story today and God brought it, Praise the Lord. The devil is always trying to intimidate us, but we have to do God’s work, despite [the devil’s] attacks. I went back to our table and a friend was telling me about how I prayed for her ear and God healed her ear, and how her car wouldn’t start. We prayed and the car started. We shared many ‘charismatic’ stories with one another. It was very uplifting. We have to keep going and praying.

Please pray for life. “If My people who are called by My Name will humble themselves and pray and seek My Face and turn from their wicked ways, then I will hear from heaven and will forgive their sin and heal their land.” (2 Chronicles 7:14)

I love you with the love of Jesus.

- Vicki

Close study of popular song suggests the relevance of continuity, both real and imagined, in the traditions of American music.

Consider, for instance, “When the Levee Breaks,” a song penned by the legendary husband and wife duo Memphis Minnie and Kansas Joe McCoy, and recorded by them in a session for Columbia Records in New York City, June 1929.

Minnie, whose real name was Lizzie Douglas, witnessed firsthand with her extended family the devastation wrought by the Great Mississippi Flood of 1927. “The terrible wall of water like an imbecile blind Titan strode triumphantly into our country,” one Mississippian remembered, “The greatest flood in American history was upon us. We did not see our lands again for four months.” Which is to say, for Memphis Minnie and hundreds of thousands of her countrymen in 1927, a broken levee was not yet a blues cliché, but instead a plain fact of hard times, her song eyewitness reportage of unmitigated human misery and helplessness.

But consider also a later and more famous version of “When the Levee Breaks,” recorded by the British rock band Led Zeppelin for their fourth studio album in 1971. While it’s tempting (and somewhat fashionable) to dismiss Zeppelin’s cover as white-boy blues in favor of some presumed authenticity found in the original — as though Minnie and Joe were not themselves writers and musicians making pointed formal choices, but instead mere avatars from whom the music flowed like rain, swelling the great river to its flood — in such dismissal we lose sight of what’s truly artful in Zeppelin’s rendition, that seven-minute epic of sheer, drowning doom. No longer an eyewitness account of the flood itself, of course, but rather an imagined response to deep echoes of disaster in the American music the band adored and sought to emulate, a love so profound and all-consuming they were able, even as Englishmen, to hear a place for themselves, a continuity, deep within its singing heart.

Continuity, then: both real and imagined, working in concert to enrich our canon of song.

But given that we live in such in such a deracinated world, where every cultural artifact is mediated by technology over vast distances, we often end up scrounging for examples of real continuity, or overvaluing what we might have already. Perhaps as musicians and songwriters we need to speak more openly about where imagination takes us in relation to tradition. Imagination might end up being exactly what makes our music — the music of the future — most distinctive.

“Drinks on Good Friday,” the song featured at the top of these reflections, is a Holy Week offering from Lydwine’s own house band, the Cimarron Kings. It imagines, in the lacunae of Scripture, Simon Peter in the terrible hours of the Lord’s demise, the apostle in his cups, stewing in his shame.

He was a fisherman. He was a good old boy. He lived his life at the water’s edge, but died head down on a cross. Romano Guardini marveled at “that great, undaunted will to union with Christ which is the apostle’s profoundest trait.” As with the feeding of the multitude, all four gospels recall the scandal of Peter’s denial.

In his 2011 book Catholicism: A Journey to the Heart of the Faith, then-Father Robert Barron offered a telling anecdote:

“In April of 2005 the newly elected pope Benedict XVI came onto the front loggia of St. Peter’s Basilica to bless the crowds. Gathered around him on the adjoining balconies there appeared all of the cardinals who had just chosen him. The news cameras caught the remarkably pensive expression on the face of Cardinal Francis George of Chicago. When the cardinal returned home, reporters asked him what he was thinking about at that moment. Here is what he said: ‘I was gazing over toward the Circus Maximus, toward the Palatine Hill where the Roman Emperors once resided and reigned and looked down upon the persecution of Christians, and I thought, ‘Where are their successors? Where is the successor of Caesar Augustus? Where is the successor of Marcus Aurelius? And finally, who cares? But if you want to see the successor of Peter, he is right next to me, smiling and waving at the crowds.’ ”

As we Catholics argue endlessly over what our pontiff, in his authority, should or shouldn’t do — despite threats of Masonic plots, communist infiltration, schism, bankruptcy, and the lavender mafia — we seldom stop to reflect how strange it is that Peter should still walk among us at all.

Gathered in his apostolic bond, we journey with him toward the heart of original continuity, the heart of the real — a walk on water, perhaps, even if only a few tentative steps, but each step closer to the Lord Himself, whom we might then witness firsthand, our still point in the raging storm, even as the levees crumble.

- Good Friday, 2025

Brian Kennedy is the founder of Lydwine, as well as the frontman and principal songwriter of the arthouse country band The Cimarron Kings. He lives with his wife and six children in Guthrie, Oklahoma.

“Angels react to these sensory impressions by moving — and how else could they come to react to gravity with movements if they did not feel it? Their perception releases an urge to move in a particular direction with a particular velocity. Should they resist this urge they would feel uncomfortable, and since nothing stands in the way of their following the impulse they yield to it.

“But should the earth not feel the same impulse as she circles the sun and as she is distracted this way and that by other planets?

“Do we know that she does not?

“Humans have the weak but analogous feeling that their centre of gravity is toward the earth. This feeling never leaves us as we stand or walk. Angels have the equivalent feeling in relation to the whole world.

“While they surpass us in this heavenly sense, they lack our most primitive human senses of touch and perhaps of taste, just as they lack our limbs which are needed only on firm ground. However, they possess our higher sensibilities in a more nearly perfect state of development.

“Since angels are also independent eyes whose whole structure is attuned to light, we can imagine how perfect their vision must be. By comparison with them we are blind moles.

“I would not object to supposing that they even sense electricity and magnetism. These are only modifications of light and will have to be observed somehow. In this case, they may also be able to produce electricity or magnetism at will; they may, in fact, be perfect specimens of those fishes known as electric rays. The earth, this faraway planet, is electrical. Why should the planets closest to the sun not be electrical as well?

“Angels also are able to produce and hear sounds as we do, though they are more accomplished than we are in this respect. They have a definite advantage over us which I must mention. Dance and music are sisters which seem to have originated in the same ovum. When we wish to dance we make music, but this may not always match our steps. Not so the angels. Dance and music are one for them. Their dance creates its own music, just as the sounds created by the minutest substances consist of a rapid vibration of constituent atoms — an atomic dance. When several substances dance together they create proper sound patterns.

“The speed of the planets is prodigious and increases with their proximity to the sun. Thus, when the living planets whirl quickly around the sun or around each other, tones should ring out corresponding to their movements. Thus, when angels dance, their music is composed simultaneously. They dance its sound patterns.

“This is the true harmony of the spheres. It is the harmony of beautiful eyes, of the angels.

“The question remains: can God alone perceive this harmony? An angel can produce sounds without moving, simply by quickly vibrating different parts of himself. He can accomplish this in an infinite number of ways, producing an infinite variety of rhythms and tonal sequences. What is more, he can hear such sounds just as he can produce them. One speaks of angelic voices in referring to certain earthly singers. If only one could hear the song of a real angel or of an angels’ choir! An angel can also contract and expand very quickly, and from what we know of the expressions of joy and pain in angels we can imagine that laughter or sobbing depend on whether he is expanded or contracted quickly beyond his normal state.

“The sounds, in either case, will be more musical than ours…”

“Now that I have presented an irrefutable truth to which Newton himself would not refuse to pay homage, I may be allowed to add a final hypothesis.

“Because of the tremendous heat of the sun nothing firm can exist on or near it. Thus, angels’ bodies can be no coarser than air or vapour. Thus, they may be regarded as bubbles of vapour, filled with aether and with air, and containing cellular tissue of yet finer bubbles of vapour arranged like inner organs. My hypothesis is this: some are filled with oxygen, others with hydrogen. The former are male, the latter female. They constantly rise from the sun, unite, and produce the light that shines from the sun through their marriage — the burning of hydrogen and oxygen.

“Sunlight, therefore, is simply the wedding torch of the angels.

“My creatures have been angels, eyes, planets, and have finally transformed themselves into bubbles of vapour which, as I realize now, have been created in the watery moisture of my eyes which was caused by the strain of gazing into the sun. This gave me the illusion of viewing my bubbles objectively. And as they have now burst, so the thread of my story is suddenly broken.”

- Dr. Mises (Gustav Fechner), from The Comparative Anatomy of Angels, 1825; translated by Hildegard Corbet and Marilyn E. Marshall