Stephen Benz - Reading the Signs and other itinerant essays

Also By Stephen Benz

Topographies

Americana Motel

Green Dreams

Guatemalan Journey

In his progress from the place we called home to remote and little visited, Stephen Benz meets a lot of out-of-the-ordinary people: Dale the tobacco-spitting harvest field-crew hand; Mr. Johnson, the gruff Bible-reading grounds crew boss; Carolyn Terry, the curator of the worlds only apron museum; an unnamed Elko, Nevada waitress who bets all her tip money; his own suddenly-appearing but finally-disappearing Uncle Joe; Daniel the Romanian partisan. He also sees a lot of out-of-the-way places: the Palouse; Iuka, Mississippi; Quanah, Texas; the Parting-of-the-Ways; Transnistria; Camaguey. Benz journeys from the bones to the stars, and along the way he makes himself into Everyperson: Reading the Signs offers up the stories of the Listener, the memories of the Watcher.

Stephen Benzs essays are simultaneously personal and universal in the way they tap into human experience. From family stories to travels of great distance, Benz takes readers on a compelling journey. Rich in sense of place, these essays deftly challenge physical and spiritual divides while exploring various crossroads near and far.

Benzs essays hold the reader all the way, section after section. This is a book for anyone who has a traveling heart.

Benzs fascinating new book teaches us to read the land through his experience, whether driving a truck, cruising battle sites or Indian and Latin American culture. By the end, he helps us understand what it means to find ones place in history.

Stephen Benz

Etruscan Press

2021 by Stephen Benz

All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in critical articles or reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publisher:

Etruscan Press

Wilkes University

84 West South Street

Wilkes-Barre, PA 18766

(570) 408-4546

www.etruscanpress.org

Published 2022 by Etruscan Press

Printed in the United States of America

Cover design by Logan Rock

Interior design and typesetting by Aaron Petrovich

The text of this book is set in Mrs Eaves

First Edition

17 18 19 20 5 4 3 2 1

Library of Congress Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

Library of Congress Control Number: 2021906702

Please turn to the back of this book for a list of the sustaining funders of Etruscan Press.

This book is printed on recycled, acid-free paper

For my children, Rachel, Nathan, and Steve

whose inspiration is everywhere in these pages

Reading the Signs and other itinerant essays

Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following publications where some of these essays first appeared.

When I was a boy, my friends and I often rode our bicycles along the old river road out past city limits and across the valley where, near the state line, we rested on the riverbank. Our turnaround point was a monument placed by the County Pioneer Society and Loyal Citizens of the State. The granite pillar told a story, a story we learned by heart and pondered as we probed the tall grass and dirt mounds in search of old bones.

In September 1858, following the Battle of Four Lakes, Colonel George Wright marched across the Spokane Plains, burning Native American storehouses and lodges. On the eighth, his command came upon horses belonging to the Palouse. Wrights dragoons wrangled in eight hundred and nine mounts, an exact count taken to satisfy the armys penchant for recordkeeping.

Wright convened a board of officers to decide the horses fate. Official policy discouraged horse slaughter. But this was war, and all was fair, the colonel reasoned. Keeping the beasts would invite raids, and they were far too wild to herd east with the command. Slaughter was a chance, he said, to strike a blow the savages would never forget.

The board agreed with Wright: horses gave the enemy their best means of resistance. Without horses, redskins are powerless, the board declared in recommending slaughter. The record does not say whether anyone dissented or spoke in the horses favor.

Troops were detailed to build a corral. The quartermaster chose the horses one by one and sent them down to a river bar, where the soldiers first shot the older horses then crushed the skulls of colts, causing the brood mares kept waiting to neigh long into the night. That sound, carrying far in the darkness, left its imprint on one soldier, a corporal, who years later would weep whenever he heard horses neigh at night.

A cruel sight, the corporal wrote his wife, to see so many noble creatures shot down; even now I hear their forlorn appeal for our mercy. It was not granted.

The killing went on all night while Donatis comet crossed the cold sky. The Palouse warriors, held in chains, saw the falling stars as souls, the souls of horses running free.

At dawn, with hundreds yet to kill, the officer in charge ordered two companies to line the riverbank and fire volleys into the corral. A contest was held to see who could kill the greatest number. Spirits were higha sign, the corporals letter said, of mans ferocious character.

Years after the troops had gone, the corral remained a midden, the mounds of horsehair and bleached bones called by newly arrived pioneers Wrights Boneyard.

Wright himself, in his log and on the map he made to accompany his report, settled on a blunter name for the place. This happened, he wrote, at Horse Slaughter Camp.

We never found any skeletal remains at the site. But we carried away the bones of the story, which stayed in our memory and changed the way we understood the history of the place we called home.