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MARISA and the Enema Fetish by J. G. Knox Love, Truth & Life Publishing PO Box 65130 Vancouver, WA 98665 1-360-690-0842 © Copyright 2009 by J .G. Knox Contents Care and feeding.of Werewolves The Priest on Education and Sex Chapter 1 The Tent A cold day, late afternoon, October 10, 1913, two weeks before my eleventh birthday, I am Russian, from St. Petersburg, the daughter of a mathematics teacher and a librarian. I stand on a piece of flat in the mouth of a canyon in Colorado, buttoning my coat and watching a layer of clouds blow over us from the east. Smashing into the mountains, trying to follow the wind over the peaks, all day the clouds came, wave after wave of them, mountain peaks visible above them, mountain slopes visible below them, clouds in between, no cloud making it over the wall, their water, their ice, and their lives sucked out climbing the mountains, becoming part of glaciers, and part of ice covering cliffs, cliffs that in morning shined like a hundred miles of cathedral windows catching the sun, reflecting the image of the mountains back to the plains. The plains, endless horizons, endless hope; the mountains, endless crests, endless faith, looking toward the plains, holding Daddy and Momma’s educated hands, I am warmed by endless love. They taught me to walk on paved city streets and to read in a park near the university. My parents always learning, sharing, and teaching me, I yearned to walk the halls of the Imperial Public Library again. Why were we in mountains with no colleges, no other scholars? Daddy saw the missing in me, the clouds in my eyes. He said, “Marisa, what is the square of three?” “Nine,” I said. “The cube?” “27” “There, over the horizon is Wichita, Kansas. Is it colder there or here?” “We’re higher. It’s colder here,” I said. “How much,” he asked. “We’re at 7,300 feet. Wichita is below two thousand, isn’t it?” “Around that,” Daddy said. I said, “Ok, more than five thousand feet difference, at 5 degrees per thousand feet, its more than twenty five degrees Fahrenheit colder here. Right, Daddy?” “If the same conditions are here, as there, yes,” he said, hugging me. I was his girl, his only student. We kept walking. Momma never asked me questions like that. A librarian at the Imperial Public Library, she read Russian literature. Daddy made me compute and think. Momma made me read and remember. She brought books home for me. Three million books on the shelves, more than can be read in a lifetime, what could be more permanent, more lasting than studying, learning forever in a city with unlimited knowledge in the public library? But in my ten years, only my parents and their lives intertwined in mine lasted, was permanent, geography changed, learning changed. No Russian books here, not even enough to keep me reading for an afternoon, I missed the reading. I missed my teachers smiling at me, thinking of me as brilliant, but not really brilliant, the daughter of two well educated people teaching me at home. Here my teachers saying I was stupid, all the Russian children were stupid, understood nothing, we were not able to follow the simplest instructions in English. There were no paved streets in the coal mining camps of Colorado, no libraries, no colleges, and no Russian speaking teachers in schools. Holding my parents hands in St. Petersburg by the sea, an ancient city, it was their love that made it beautiful. Their books in my head, I felt their hands. I closed my eyes---St. Petersburg, home. The Baltic Sea alive with waves to a horizon, like the plains, always changing, always there, physical reality balanced culture and intellectual reality. My eyes opened---Colorado, America, no words to read, no books or ballet to balance natural grandeur, beautiful, spectacular sights filling my eyes, more than can be seen in a lifetime. Momma looked east seeing a two thousand feet drop onto the plain, across eastern Colorado, into Kansas, endless fields of wheat, flat land, the heartland of America, where horizons never end, where the fairy dust of hope makes the most distant dreams come true, where children grow up to mount horses and ride the world, be ridden over, or plant their feet in the earth with the wheat and live forever free, and never hungry. Daddy looked west, unmistakable, the Colorado Front Range, a wall of more than ten thousand foot tall mountains, impenetrable, a block to travel even now, roads and trains go north to Wyoming, around these mountains. To us, close enough to touch, close enough to see snow on ground, in trees above our camp, a permanent white glacier higher in the canyon, a gravelly creek near camp with the best water Daddy ever tasted, and always cold, just above freezing in August, He breathed in cold, crisp air, breathed in faith in the mountains, the work, the future---in America, the place he, Momma, and I, not noble born, could rise to be all we could be. Daddy saw mountains to stand on, to touch sky from their peaks, but not this late in the season, another warmer season, when English was no longer an impenetrable wall of words, when we were ready, when the snow retreated far enough up the mountains to make them climbable again. I looked at us, felt my father’s strong hand, coal dust imbedded in the cracks between hard calluses; felt my mother’s smaller hand, once soft, a librarian handling books, now hard from washing laundry and household work, she was alive with love, endless love, radiating to my father, to me. Love is the thing that lasts, not mountains, plains, St. Petersburg, or this material world, love, love lasts. We hugged as we stood together in the mountain’s shadow, as sun still lit the plain, filled with love, our last sunset together. We walked back to our tent on a darkening trail, with well lit memories in our souls. Night came, men, women, and children talking around an open flame, children herded to beds on cold ground called for their mothers to warm them. Talking quieted. Men crowded closer to the fire, and, one by one, join their wives, their families. Glowing under burned black wood, the fading red of embers below, ringed by frosted grass, our campfire, no longer a warm spot, no place of warmth except under blankets, cold bit us with ice teeth. Predawn light, dark figures and warm breaths in the tent, I watched Daddy, sleeping, breathing, his hot air condensing into mist, rising clouds against the tent top, clouds that drifted above his head, turned to ice, disappeared, precipitating as snow on the Front Range, sticking to the underside of freezing cloth before reaching the top of the tent. Thin glaciers coated canvas hanging above us, most covering ribbed thread patterns, brown cloth now white. I saw spots directly over our heads, ice thick enough to be imagined as alpine lakes frozen over, a first layer of winter snow blown in patterns on their smooth surface, the pattern of threads surrounding them like a snowy shore. Daybreak igniting ice crystals radiated into our tent. The sun emerged sliver by sliver from the prairie’s oceanesque horizon. Velvet white shoreline threads turned brown and lakes melted, rivulets slithered down the canvas. Our tent thawed. And, as every good winter camper knows, the enemy is not ice, but water, water permeating coats, blankets and other insulating materials chills to freezing, thirty two degrees: Daddy’s back and shoulder against the tent damming the flow, cold water soaked into his coat, shirt, and long johns, a rude alarm clock woke him. Day started. Pushing tight against me, Daddy’s arm over me holding Momma’s waist, drawing us tight into a single bundle of flesh, shielding us from cold, yet trying to get more of himself under the blanket, a blanket too small for three people, Daddy sleeping partially covered, protected us, kept Momma and me completely covered, warmer than he kept himself. Closing my eyes, trying to sleep, sandwiched on my side between Momma and Daddy my body was warm, and my left foot, but my right foot, still under a blanket, in space, touching neither Momma nor Daddy, it felt cold, unloved, and left out. My foot ached. Daddy moved bringing his leg down on my foot, resting his toes on Momma’s toes, the warmth of his leg eased the pain of my foot, as his shivering vibrated me more awake. Before shaking hands buttoned his coat and he left Momma and me, he tucked us both tighter under the blanket. “I love you, Sarra,” he kissed Momma, then me, “I love you, Marisa.” Momma said, “Love you, Alexi,” and dozed off again. Lifting the tent flap, a whiff of frozen mountain air, he let in light, the reflection of a pink face of ice on a snow capped peak. The far side of the valley, the ice’s mirror image lit the interior of our tent enough to see faces, and welcomed daylight reflecting back into the plains for a hundred miles. Daddy saw me smile, knew I was awake and kissed me again. Ice from his beard left wet streaks on my face. Daddy fumbled with his boots, laboriously covering his triple socked feet, stiff, not with age, but with frost, hypothermic arthritis. He was thirty; he needed heat, even the white in his beard healed blonde again with five minutes thawing before a fire. First up, he rekindled the campfire and added billows of gray smoke to the mist of morning. Standing close to the flame, he shivered in a circle of men, drying the cold wet spots on his back, all the men warming similar cold spots, their beards darkened, their shivering eased with the fire’s warmth. I didn’t need to say I loved him. He didn’t need to see it in my smile. He knew I loved him. Nevertheless, I was glad he saw it that morning. In the light outside the tent, I remember his smile beaming down on me in the early light. Closing the tent flap, he was gone, huddled with other men by the fire. Both my feet against Momma, and warm, I dozed off. Momma and I slept an hour more. I liked sleeping in our house. Sleeping alone under three blankets and a goose down comforter, and a pot bellied stove glowing in the living room, I never woke in my bed with a cold foot, but did I ever wake feeling so loved? The love I felt that week in an old tent, made for two, sleeping three, was something defining, something that warmed my soul through the decades, whenever I thought of my Momma, my Daddy. Sleeping between them, my back scrunched tight against Momma and my head on Daddy’s shoulder was a different warm, a loving warm, Daddy not working, Momma not keeping house, with them living in that tent was the best time in my life, and the worst time in my life. I thought of out house in St. Petersburg, a nice house; I thought of our house further up the canyon, smaller, simpler, but a nice house. Why were we camping in the cold? Two weeks ago, Daddy in the mine when it started, a man ran through yelling, “Get out!” Men at the entrance shouted strange noises in English, did Daddy and the other Russians have any idea what they were talking about? Mikhail shoved a sign in Daddy’s hand, for him to carry. He could sound out and pronounce what the strange looking letters said: “On strike!” What did it mean? When we came to the mine four months earlier, a man stood on the platform by the train with a sign that said, “Welcome Mine Workers of America.” How would we know what it said? If Mikhail had not shouted into the box car in Russian, we would have stayed on the train. Daddy said, “What’s a strike?” Mikhail explained it to him. Daddy said, “Cossacks will kill us!” Mikhail laughed, said, “This is America. No Cossacks. The Union will protect us.” The Union hired Daddy, brought us here, and made sure the company paid us. The Union hired Russian men at the boats in New York, Daddy one of them. He trusted the Union and Mikhail, the gang boss. He liked the idea of a union, of the people having someone to represent them, to look after the interest of the workers. Daddy said, “Russia would be better with unions.” Russia had a Czar, peasants, and Cossacks---not unions, the Czar communicating with the peasants through the Cossacks; the peasants communicating with the Czar through God. If God heard the peasants, God would speak to the Czar directly as he sipped French wine standing by a marble fireplace in the Winter Palace. If the peasants persisted in screaming for help from God, and the Czar didn’t hear God, the Czar sent more Cossacks. My father had no faith in God hearing peasant screams, nor in God-deaf Czars; he had faith in the Union, Mikhail, and a man in New York speaking directly to the capitalist owner for him. Daddy carried his sign and looked down the road, over the hills, and into the valley below---no lines of Cossacks marching toward them. Quietly my Daddy looked to heaven and said, “Thank God, we’re in America.” At dawn, a week ago, sleeping in my bed, a noise started, a neighbor screamed. Other shouts came in English. Momma grabbed me, my clothes, and pushed me out the door in my night gown. Men in brown uniforms stood with rifles in a line. What were they saying? One was yelling. The others pointed their rifles at us. Momma hurried me away in the direction the man in front pointed. “Momma, what’s happening,” I said. “Cossacks, American Cossacks! Run, Marisa, run!” I ran. Company thugs forced us from our homes and into tents the first week of the Front Range Coal Strike. |
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