Introduction
Running throughout this issue, though not by editorial design, is that typically postmodern sense of absence, in so many configurations: in the memoir, for instance, as loss; or in fiction, as the absence of fulfilled desire, the basic plot of a story being that someone wants something and has problems getting it; or in poetry, as the kind of absence that is also presence—what is not said, what cannot be said, but which haunts or illumines or in some way alters what is otherwise explicit. No doubt I am noticing this because my obsession these days is a certain kind of absence that is sociological and political but has everything to do with literature: the death of hundreds of small towns throughout the midwest, the vanishing of an entire stratum of American culture that produced the Willa Cathers, Sherwood Andersons, William Staffords, and Angie Debos of our world, as well as some of the writers in this issue—
The Beauty of Abandoned Towns
Finally we sold out—you know, the big farm eats the small farm.
—Edna Pforr, Hamberg, North Dakota
...ruins do not speak; we speak for them.
—Christoper Woodward, In Ruins
Jefferson, Marx, and Jesus. Looking back, you can hardly believe it.
Bindweed and crabgrass shouldering through asphalt cracks, rats scuttling down drainpipes, undergrowth seething with grasshoppers.
The bumper crop in 1929 . I stood on the front porch, dawn rolling over me like a river baptism because I was a new man in a new world, a stand of gold and green stretching from my hands to the sun coming up. In a way, a mirage. We bought a house in town. There it is. Or was.
The water tower, taller than the copper domes of Sacred Heart in Leoville, silhouette flooding the football field, missing boards of the scavenged bleachers, minor prophecies: Bobby + Pam forever, Panthers rule, peace now.
Presence is absence, says the philosopher. The past devours the future. Look at the goatgrass and ragweed claiming the feed store.
Sunflowers banging their heads on a conclusion of brick, the wind's last argument lost in a yellow cloud.
Eugene Debs set up The People's College in Fort Scott. Meridel LeSeuer grew up there. It lasted three years. Imagine: Comrade Debs, Comrade Sheppard, Comrade LeSeuer. In Kansas.
The open windows of the high school no longer surprise, pigeons flying in and out, the dumb cry of blackboards, wooden desks hauled away with the carved names of the long absent, the lost, the dead, the escaped.
The Farmer's Alliance tried. Socialist farm policy was for them a straight road to Jefferson's democracy. But they were always blocked by the big landowners. The deal-breaker was profits, not politics. The harvest was top soil, not wheat.
The last hitching post. The last horse, I suppose. Like Sunday morning, the last hymn, the last person to hear the last hymn. May the circle be unbroken. The circle is broken.
We subscribed to the Haldeman-Julius Appeal to Reason, published out of little Girard, Kansas. Our children grew up on his Little Blue Books. The Federalist Papers, Thoreau, Emerson, Marx, Ingersoll, Upton Sinclair.
The clapboard stores, slats long ago sand-blasted in dust storms, bleached or ochre now, gray, the faint green and yellow of a Lipton Tea ad on red brick. Broken windows flashing the setting sun in a little apocalypse of light, blind men in shades staring at the horizon, waiting for a sign. Stillness everywhere.
You know, you're wasting your time. No one gives a shit about this. None of it. No one.
Dearth of cars, motion, grind of gears, noise of commerce, chatter and cry of farm kids dangling from the beds of rusted-out pickups, murmur and guffaw of old men outside the Savings and Loan, stories, jokes. Quiet as a first snow. Somewhere a dog barks. A wire gate slams shut.
I'm so goddamned old I still tense up when an afternoon sky darkens. A roller would come in, dust up to eight thousand feet. If you were in the field, you were lost until it cleared. Or dead from suffocation. Where was your family? Where were your children?
Houses with tin roofs, wrap-around porches for watching thunderstorms, most vacant, but here and there pickup windows flaming in sunset, trimmed lawn, history in forty years of license plates nailed to the garage wall. Cellar door. Swing set, that little violin screech of rusted chains, hush of evening, choir of cicadas. The living among the dead.
It started when agriculture professors began to teach farming as a business rather than a vocation. And then the big ones over the years ate the little ones. But in this country vocations are exploited. Ask the public school teachers.
The lords of grain: two cats fat on field mice lounge beneath the elevator steps where dust from a caleche road powders them white—wraiths, ghost-cats. Survivors.
On the other hand, subsidies kill small farms these days. But back then we were desperate. Our children were hungry. FDR kept us alive. Then something went wrong. Big got bigger, small died. Still dying, hanging on but bed-ridden. The Ogallala aquifer's almost tapped out. I mean, for God's sake.
Between the boarded bank and the welding shop husks drift like molted feathers or the sloughed scales of cottonmouths. Weeds waist-high shade the odd shoe still laced, a Coke carton bleeding into bluestem, dulled scraps of newsprint that say who died in Ashland or Sublette or Medicine Lodge.
It goes back to the oikos, the Greek family farm. Some ethic, some code of honor, kept them small. Big was vulgar, immoral. The Romans, too. Cato the elder, rich as Joe Kennedy, taught his son agronomy, not commerce.
They are not haunted. They are not the "ghosts of themselves." They are cousin to vanishing, to disappearance. They are the highway that runs through them.
The picture show shut down decades ago. That's where we saw the world, the world our children and grandchildren ran off to. What happens when a nation loses its agrarian populace? My grandson worked as an usher there. He's a poet now. We have more poets than farmers. I don't think that's what Jefferson had in mind.
Not even decline, but the dawn of absence. Architecture of the dead. The lives they housed are dust, the wind never stops.
Sixty percent of the American soldiers killed in Iraq are from small rural towns. The farmer/soldier, foundation of the Greek polis. Fodder for war. Blood harvest.
The wind never stops. Our children were hungry. The highway's long blade under the sun. Something went wrong. The towns are empty. The circle is broken.