Ralph Salisbury - So Far, So Good

River Teeth Literary Nonfiction Prize

SERIES EDITORS:

Daniel Lehman, Ashland University

Joe Mackall, Ashland University

The River Teeth Literary Nonfiction Prize is awarded to the best work of literary nonfiction submitted to the annual contest sponsored by

River Teeth: A Journal of Nonfiction Narrative

2013 by Ralph Salisbury

All rights reserved

Manufactured in the United States of America

Library of Congress

Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Salisbury, Ralph J.

So far, so good / Ralph Salisbury.

p. cm.

(River Teeth Literary Nonfiction Prize)

Epub ISBN 978-1-4962-1144-6
Mobi ISBN 978-1-4962-1145-3
1. Salisbury, Ralph J. 2. Poets, American20th centuryBiography. 3. College teachersUnited StatesBiography.
4. Racially mixed peopleUnited StatesBiography. 5. Cherokee IndiansBiography. 6. Irish AmericansBiography. 7. Social values. 8. Civilization, Modern20th century. I. Title.

ps3569.a4597z46 2013

818'.5403dc23 [B] 2012035280

Set in Minion by Laura Wellington.

Designed by Nathan Putens.

The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

To my wife and fellow writer, Ingrid Wendt; to Jeff, Brian, and Martina, my children; and to Connor, Travis, Gemma, and Gavino, my grandchildren.

PROLOGUE

Bullet-shattered glass clattering onto my baby bed, I awake and cry, into darkness, for help.

Do I remember this? Or do I remember being told? I will feel it, whichever it is. I will feel it, chill bomb-bay wind buffeting my eighteen-year-old body, a mile above an old volcanos jagged debris; feel it, seeing photos of Jewish concentration camp children, huddled together for warmth, photos of Korean orphans, huddled together, homeless in blizzard after American bombing bombing in which, twenty-five, I had refused an order to join.

Ma snatches my blanket-swaddled body up, to shield me against whatever might come next, and glass shards pierce her arms. Pa lunges out into the night, gripping a pistol, with which hed once wounded an armed robber and had too many times drunkenly terrorized his own family.

Pa, alert to shoot whoever is attacking our home, finds only snow snow a mass killer that will, scientists tell us, bury the last child to be born on earth.

Targeting a farmhouse window would be a drive-by shooting in todays news news meant to arouse fear fear, which seems to sell medications, deodorants, conformist designer clothes, manipulative political candidates, and an economically disastrous, bad-for-everyones-physical-and-mental-health, materialistic, militaristic imperialism.

Bombs exploding, hundreds of babies cremated alive what did my experience of the worlds violence amount to really? A racially motivated harassment? A neighborhood grudge? Or, maybe, a drunken young stranger saw our dimly lighted farmhouse windows as an opportunity to outdo pals, whod shot holes into road signs, meant to keep people from being lost or from losing their lives on dangerous curves.

A drive-by shooting a mystery.

A drive-on shooting not mystery but history: Giddyap, oxen, mule, horse and drive, drive, drive on, to the last acre of free-for-the-taking land on, on, on, to extermination of the last of the Mohicans of tribe after tribe after tribe.

A ride-by shooting motivation: an Easterners urge to imitate fictional Wild West heroes, by aiming out of a train window and killing a buffalo or an Indian.

I think of my brother Bobs telling me that another American soldier shot an Arab off his horse, in Algeria, during World War II, just for the hell of it.

In this rambling, free-associational placement of electronic impulse on screen, ink on page, there will be some accounts of terror and death. Few compared to those on TV news but more than I, or you, might wish.

A survivor of one lightning strike, some car and plane mishaps, some explosions, a few bullets, a heart attack, cancer, and other human afflictions, I ask myself, as readers may well be asking, why should anyone read this?

Maybe for warnings implicit in my confessed mistakes. Maybe for what little wisdom my many years have bestowed. Maybe for the story of someone who grew up without indoor plumbing or electricity and worked despite hunger in often above 100-degree heat and often 30-below-zero cold, from lantern-lit predawn to lantern-lit late night, on a Mississippi River Valley farm, beside a narrow, dusty, muddy, or snow-choked dirt wagon trail, which had become an auto road.

If you had walked that road with me from my fourth through my eleventh years stamping with one booted heel, maybe, to crack yesterdays footprints ice into zig-zag lightning you would have found yourself in a one-room schools smells of chalk dust, glue, and the seldom bathed bodies of children.

If you had joined me in visiting my fathers mother, you would have hiked several miles along a creek, on a generations-worn footpath, until you reached the small hill farm, to which our outgunned and outnumbered Cherokee-Shawnee forebears had fled, abandoning rich valley plantations to murderous, government-sanctioned mobs.

Someone who hunted first with bow and arrow and then, starting at age twelve, with rifle and shotgun, and helped to keep his family alive, I might belong in a museum, among stuffed animals, but I have learned to use this computer, more complex than those with which I aimed the cannon and machine guns of a B -29 bomber same type plane as the two that ended lives in Hiroshima and Nagasaki and changed all of our lives.

I was seventeen when I enlisted in what was then the army air corps. I was twenty when World War II ended, and I was twenty-five when I refused orders to join in the fire-bombing of North Korean cities and only escaped prison because a computer failed to extend my enlistment and sent my World War II honorable discharge the week before I was to be arrested. Seventy-five now, in a year when Muslim martyrs suicide attacks have destroyed the U.S. World Trade Center and much of the Pentagon and killed thousands, I have started this day, as I have started most days for most of my life, by trying to write.

Why?

Yesterday I would have given the honest answer Socrates was executed for giving to most questions worth asking, I do not know.

Today, my life and the lives of all living things soon to end, I do know why I am beginning to try to write a hop-skip-and-jumps-and-maybe-some-dancing memoir. My daughter, to whom I read or told stories nearly every night of her childhood, has asked me to put some of our familys realities down, with no fictionalizing and no poeticizing, just things as they were. I am trying, although, for most of my life, I have depended on imagination as an astronaut depends on a heat shield, imagination protecting me from the painful realities I have needed to reenter.

Free association, spontaneity, a wholeness of the moment, a union of past and present, of childhood and after these are what I seek, and the result may be as random and unorganized as my bank account and my life. Whether or not I live to finish and publish this manuscript, here are some memories of a poverty-stricken, malnourished, sometimes nearly fatally ill, and mostly mysteriously happy child, memories of a mixed-race, somewhat educated world citizen. And memories of an individual seeking what seems to be best for himself, for his loved ones, and for other individuals.