The Big One, and: Resagos Kings, and: Howlin' Wolf on Tour: Cedar Theater, Minneapolis, 1969

Abstract

The Big One, and: Resagos Kings, and: Howlin' Wolf on Tour: Cedar Theater, Minneapolis, 1969 Scott Lowery (bio) The Big One Later, we all remembered where we'd been,waking to that first look, curtains peeledfor the not-much upshot: so far, just an inch or two, still sifting downin the half-light between our houses.Even then, something seemed off— it was dull, granular, more like salt,piling up the way salt doesin the palm of your hand. Afterward, we would try to picture the grassbeing swallowed so slowly, try tocount back the weeks and months. How long did it take us to hearthe whole silence, its softaccumulation stilling the very air? You couldn't shovel your way out. At first, we still gestured to neighborspassing in the snow, mumbledin our homes for the practice, even [End Page 95] tottered out among the speechless—soon enough, stores and jobs fell away,traffic thinned, then disappeared, while our faint voices soundedmore and more like the windwhistling among the unspoken trees around us. Now it's even later.An ax leans against firewood,blade rusting. The bird-feeder's empty. A man leafs through a book, unableto sound out the words. A womanstands distracted at a sink, washing her hands over and overin cold, gray water. Her look driftsto the window, slow as winter flies. Resagos Kings Hugo Meinhardt Speier (1888–1969) When I first made compost, I smelled it: cigar smoke, like wine, like elm leaves.I can taste its bite in sauerkraut, the twitch of an inner life. Cigar smoke thick as vines tendrilled beneath their big front door:our first greeting, before her hug or his gruff What'll you have? [End Page 96] His voice sounded like cigar smoke: rich brown, warm as gravybut sour too, with something bitten off, chewed on a little too long. So, boys, are you minding your mother? How are your grades this year?Tobacco haze hung from answers we mumbled toward our feet, each cigar a dark leafy root fondled between thick fingers,or slotted in the columned ashtray, ancestral incense twisting up: it flavored Grandma's chocolate cake, and followed us outside to kneel,be shown how borders should be clipped, much closer to the ground. Resagos Kings, cigars from Batista: this empty box I've keptheld only nuts and bolts for years, and now just smells of rust. And look, in these old photos, how he winks and grins, eyes dancing— his true self, kept wrapped in smoke? There's no one left to ask. [End Page 97] Howlin' Wolf on Tour: Cedar Theater, Minneapolis, 1969 Better if they had been born in the open pasture and suckled by a wolf, that they might have seen with clearer eyes. thoreau, Walden Cutting his buildup short, the little emceetries to hold the big man back. Folks, the doctor said …He's brushed aside as Wolf's train-engine chest plows forward out of the dark. Quick silencein the house, our quiet respiration stuck in softwhite throats. Crouched where the stage stops, he just looks us over, a staring giant in a suitthe color of cold steel. Caught in that gaze,your senses wake up one by one, starting with the small neck hairs. You see the band,deadpan in their narrow ties, journeymenof the night shift. He turns on them, waits, nods and the shuffle that they kick into just lifts uslike a weather change, a big moon aboveprophetic fields. When he lets his voice loose ain't no peace in the barnyard—the old hall throbs, stagelights flashingtranscendental smokestack lightning, shinin' just like gold, just two or threerelentless chords, arc-welded, indomitable,a rusty scrapyard across the tracks [End Page 98] from where we're from—then a bottle breaks,a train blasts through, and our complacent eyesclear up right quick, just with trying to stay alive. Okay, he has us moving in our seatsand when we rise and try to dance,our lives hang stiffly on us like Sunday clothes...