Graphic below: Lizard Rex, by Patricia Allingham Clarlson
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by Wilson Roberts
Send Scott Brown Back to Boston
G C G
We’re going to vote Scott Brown out of Washington,
D G
We just can’t afford what he’s costing us;
C A7 D/D7
The poor are getting colder and the rich are getting bolder every day;
C G
Low taxes for the wealthy, not a cent to keep us healthy;
D G
That’s the Scott Brown way.
G C G
We’re going to send Scott Brown back to Wakefield, Massachusetts
D G
Back to Wakefield, Massachusetts, straight back to, Massachusetts;
C G A7 D/D7 G
We will send Scot Brown back to Wakefield Massachusetts, on Election Day.
G C
When he comes around campaigning in his pickup truck,
D
You’ll see its springs are bending from the weight of all the bucks
C G C G
From the bankers and the brokers and the hedge fund jokers,
C G C G
The drillers and the spillers and the fresh water killers,
C G C G
The backers of the frackers and the mortgage hijackers,
C G C G
The Roves and the Kochs and other such folks
D
Who demand corporate welfare and reject public health care,
C C
They’ve got the poor and middle classes right up against the wall
G A7 D D7
And Scott Brown will be their boy until we vote him out next fall.
CHO
C G
We will vote Scott Brown right out of Washington,
D G
We just can’t afford what he’s costing us;
C A7 D/D7
The poor are getting colder and the rich are getting bolder every day;
C G D G
So kick Scott Brown out of Washington, out of Washington, out of Washington
C G C D G
Kick Scott Brown out of Washington on Election Day
G C G
We will send Scott Brown back to Wakefield, Massachusetts
D G
Back to Wakefield, Massachusetts, straight back to Massachusetts;
C G A7 D/D7 G
We will send Scot Brown back to Wakefield Massachusetts, on Election Day.
"Sugar"
Shortly after noon I finished fixing the tubes running from the maples and hooked them up to vacuum pumps in order to efficiently bleed the raw sap that will flow into square hundred gallon holding tanks before being further pumped into the evaporator. It’s the third season for the tubing. We got it when we bought the farm on Christian Hill in Colrain and moved from Bucks County’s Philadelphia suburbs to the western Massachusetts hill town.
Leaving my boots and coat in the mud room, I walked into the kitchen, poured myself a cup of coffee and fell into a chair at the table. “That’s one for this year less rotten chore for this year.”
Meredith, my wife, had been repotting our butterwort and pitcher plants. She washed her hands and sat across from me, drying them with a dish towel, her face glowing with excitement. “Let’s grind up glass as finely as possible and mix it with the finished syrup we wholesale to that company in New Hampshire. Once it’s mixed in with syrup from everyone else nobody’s going to be able to trace it back to us.”
I sucked my teeth and slowly shook my head, rejecting her idea as gently as possible. It’s not a good thing to upset her unnecessarily. “I’m not so sure that would be a good thing to do.”
“It could be like old times.” She nuzzled my neck, letting her tongue run over my left ear lobe.
Her sexual gambits don’t work on me anymore. After forty years together we know one another as well as any human can know another. I prize her sexual forthrightness but dislike her attempts to manipulate me with pseudo-seductive wiles. <>
“Old times are old times. We’re retired, Merry.”
She pulled back to arms’ length, a hand on each of my shoulders as she slowly shook her head. The fine smoking lines on her upper lip were tight and the several thin white hairs just under her lower lip were quivering. “Retirement was your idea, not mine.”
“It was necessary,” I said, as I find myself reminding her on an almost daily basis. I stop there. It doesn’t accomplish anything if I mention that her memory lapses could result in disaster for both of us. Instead I leaned over and kissed her cheek. It was soft and warm and I drew her close in another embrace. We stood that way for a long moment, then separated. She crossed the room and stood looking out the window, her arms limp at her side.
I drank my coffee and stared at her still lovely form, backlit by the light from the window, every muscle in my body sore from the labor of setting the tubing up for the sugaring season, slogging through thigh deep snow and deeper snowdrifts with a bag heavy with taps and a hammer, pounding the steel taps into the hard wood of the maples and hooking them up to several miles of blue plastic tubing.
When people carp about the price of real maple syrup they have no idea of how labor intensive the production process is. I trek back and forth through our woods, harvesting firewood for the ancient evaporator that came with the farm and sugar house. I cart them back to the wood lot and saw them into two foot lengths for the wood stove in the living room and four foot lengths for the evaporator. I split and stack the wood, feed it into the firebox during the short season during which we make the syrup, put the finished syrup into the plastic barrels the wholesale company provides and cart them to the loading dock. It can all be complicated by storms and heavy winds that can knock down tubing and even pull taps from the trees, forcing me to go out again to reset things.
The tractor and truck suffer hard use running over the barely navigable logging roads on our land and I end up doing a lot of maintenance work on both vehicles over the winter, shivering in the barn tightening nuts and repairing and replacing parts, banging my grease blackened knuckles against their motors and the steel frames. Rural life in New England in no way resembles the images on calendars that hang on walls in city offices and suburban homes. I’m not knocking our situation. There is a harsh and cold beauty here that I have become comfortable with.
“It was your idea to retire, you know,” she said again, letting a heavy emphasis fall on the word, was.
“With all the farm work and the sugaring I’d hardly say we’re retired, and it was your damned idea to move to New England one the decision to leave Doylestown was made.” I hated my petulant tone, but I was already tired and cranky and the sap had not yet begun to flow. “We could have gone south, Virginia, the Carolinas.
She tilted her head and smiled. “It’s not all bad, dear. I love the Massachusetts countryside in the winter, the way bare trees stick up through the snow like skeletons reaching from a grave, rocks lying like skulls in the fields.”
“Lovely imagery.”
“There was a time when you would have found it incredibly alluring.”
“Are you happy with the way we live up here?”
She moved her hands to cup my cheeks. “I love that there are no traffic jams, no smog and noisy nosy neighbors. I like gardening, raising our own food, beheading the chickens, shooting and butchering the steers and hogs. There’s a holiness to our lives here that we’ve not had before.”
“But?”
She laughed. “You know me; I miss the excitement. Life here is utilitarian. I suppose that’s what holiness is all about, living in sync with nature.”
“Some would say with God.”
“But not us."
“Certainly not us.” I put my hands over hers. Lowering them from my face, I pulled her close, knowing exactly how she would feel as we embraced. For more than fifty years I have been holding Merry in my arms, feeling her warmth as if it were my own. “Those lines from Browning, ‘Grow old along with me, the best is yet to be,’ surely they’re among the greatest lies in all of literature.”
She pushed away with a gentle pressure and turned back toward the large kitchen window. In spite of the warm days, the ground was still covered with snow, stained from the dogs, from our treks to and from the barn, from the wood smoke soot that spouted from our chimney, and from all our many comings and goings, from the many critters and the many leaks from the cars trucks and tractors so necessary to rural life. I heard squawking from a knife point of geese migrating north.
“Spring,” she said.
“Soon there’ll be crocuses along the house foundation.”
“The lilac buds are already swelling. The trees will be next.”
“No too soon,” I said. “We need a good long sugaring season after last year’s disaster.”
Before she could respond the phone rang. Merry picked it up.
“It’s Holly,” she said, holding the phone out to me.
Holly is our only surviving child. After he first two died I gave up my teaching job at Temple University and stayed home to raise her. Merry went back to her job with the Bank of America in Philadelphia. Mother and daughter are not close. Holly has always seemed wary of Merry, as if sensing in her a coiled threat waiting to strike. As the stay at home parent I have always managed the appearance of restraint and she has been less guarded with me. I am the one she comes to with her problems, the one who smoothed things over at school after she got into fights, the one who soothed angry neighbors, the one who paid her bail and hired her lawyers. The one who made sure she lived.
I put the receiver to my ear. “What’s up?”
“I need a loan.”
“You mean you need me to give you some money. Loans don’t work with you.”
She laughed and it sounded unpleasantly like her laughter did when she was fifteen and I would tickle her. “Right. I need money. Will you wire me some?”
“How much?”
“Five thousand.”
“I’m getting off cheap this month.”
“Sometimes you just luck out, Daddy.”
“And you? Are you lucky?”
“You know how lucky I am.”
“You’re alive.”
“Can you wire the money into my account?”
“You’ll have it tomorrow.”
“Is there any way I could get it today? I’ve got a terrific deal going and I need to cinch it as quickly as possible.”
I looked at my watch. “It’s noon already. The bank in Greenfield sends its wires out at eleven. Tomorrow will have to do.”
“Shit.” She drew the word out into three breathy syllables. “Just fuckin’ forget about it, okay. I’m fucked if I can’t get the money today. Somebody else’ll get the deal. It’s uncut stuff, sweet and pure. Jesusfuckinchrist, what do I have to do to get money from you on time?”
“Let me know enough in advance that I can make the arrangements.”
“The deal just came up. I really fuckin’ need the money.”
“I’ll call Henry. If I promise to wire him the money tomorrow he’ll front it to you today.”
“Right. Dear creepy Uncle Henry. That fat fuck’ll probably try to grab a little tit as interest.”
“You want the money?”
“Fuckin’ A I want the money. I’d give the slimy piece of shit a blow job if I thought I could get it today.”
“I’ll call him as soon as we hang up. You call him in twenty minutes to make arrangement to pick up the cash.”
“Got it.”
She hung up and I called my brother. Henry agreed to lend Holly the money. “She’ll owe me something,” he said.
“Collect whatever you can. She’s no innocent flower.”
“How’s Merry?”
“She misses things.”
“You did good, moving up there. They found the bones of that Forsythe kid last week.”
“Toby,” I said.
“Yeah, Toby, and they’re digging around for more.”
“They won’t find anything.”
“The one kid is bad enough. The whole town is freaking out.”
“There’s nothing to worry about. Thanks for fronting the money.”
“It’s in my self-interest. Holly has some talent.”
“She does,” I said, and hung up.
Merry looked at me shaking her head. “You overindulge that little bitch.”
“She’s our only child.”
“Don’t blame that on me.”
“Did I say anything?”
She sighed and smiled. “No. You didn’t.” She fell silent for a moment, then spoke. “Perce Walker says with the mix of warm days and cold nights we’ve been having and the Weather Channel is predicting for the next week that this is going to be the best sugaring season in several years.”
Stretching, I eased the tension from my back and shoulders. “Henry said they found Toby Forsythe.”
“Damn, that was a long time ago. Ten years?”
“Fifteen,” I said.
“I hate the way I’m losing track of things. It’s getting worse.”
“Things’ll be okay. You’ve got me.”
“You’ve always had my back.”
“It’s been good for both of us.”
Shivering, she shook her head and rattled her lips. Then she chuckled. “They found the kid, eh? That’s going to drive people nuts down there. Maybe they’ll find some of the others. Can you imagine the stir that’ll create?”
She sighed. “Are you sure about the ground glass?”
I smiled and nodded. “That’s one of your crazier ideas.”
“You love me.”
“I do, but you’re a piece of work, babe.”
“Just thinking about what’s going on back outside of Philly makes me want to ride your mustache. How about dropping a blue pill tonight?”
“Maybe.”
“Only maybe?” She nuzzled me again, and again her tongue lightly brushed over my ear lobe. It felt good and I kissed her. She tasted like sugar.
“Yeah, maybe. There’s a lot of work to do. We get that done and I could go for it with you tonight.”
“I’ll give you a hand.” She went to the mud room, threw on her red and black checkered wool jacket and pulled a navy blue watch cap over her graying hair. Stepping into a pair of heavy LL Bean rubber boots, she walked out into the snow covered yard. I put on my jacket and boots and joined her just as another V-formation of geese slashed across the sky, a deep cerulean blue broken by a scattering of small, puffy white clouds. A cold wind came up and I zipped my jacket and pulled the collar up as a dollop of goose shit landed on my hand.
Wiping it off on the trousers of my overalls, I looked up and saw the geese in precise formation. A spasm of delight rushed over me. I reached for Merry’s hand, found it, and wrapped mine around it.
“A blue pill tonight for sure,” I said.
She gave me a squeeze of recognition and let her shoulder briefly touch my own. Looking at her, I was grateful for the years we had shared, the times we had enjoyed, the love we knew, tears welling at the thought of losing her, of her losing herself. The best certainly is not to be, I thought. Someone should have strangled Robert Browning in his cradle. I squeezed back and was about to say that I loved her when I heard Mary, our ewe, crying from the barn.
“She’s birthing,” Merry said. “That’s just what it sounded like last year.”
I nodded. “I think you’re right. She was pretty huge when I cleaned her stall last night.”
“Lambs,” Merry said. “A litter of lambs. The vet said he thought she might have as many as four this year, which is very rare.”
“That would be wonderful for you,” I said.
“Four little lambs. Who could ask for more?”
There was a time when Merry asked for, demanded a lot more than four lambs. That was before we retired to our farm on Christian Hill.
We stood in the trodden and stained snow under that spectacular sky, our hands still entwined, the squawking of the geese slowly fading in the north, their sounds replaced by Mary’s bleating rising over the cries of her newborn lambs.
“My hunting knife,” Merry said, pulling away from me and moving toward the barn. “Where is it?”
“On the back of the work table in the barn, right where you left it after the piglets were born. Be careful when you reach for it. I’m rebuilding the brush hog and I’ve got parts all over the place. Don’t knock them off the bench.”
Without another word she headed into the barn. I stood in the snow, looking up at the sky, amazed by the brilliance of its color. The geese were gone and the rising wind had blown the clouds over the hills. I could not see the sun. One by one the cries of the lambs ceased and all I could hear were Mary’s tragic cries coming through the barn door, echoing against the gray walls of the farmhouse I shared with my wife, Merry.
With an undergraduate degree in Theology from Madison NJ's former Drew Theological Seminary and a master's in English from Boone NC's Appalachian State University,
father and grandfather Wilson Roberts is now a retired Mountain Empire professor and English Literature Department chairperson, former union organizer and activist, published author, musician/songwriter, Court advocate for children, long-time personal friend of the publisher and supporter/contributor of ACR with previous work saved in the site's XYZ section and its Word Preserve archives. His novel THE SERPENT AND THE HUMMINGBIRD, "a novel dealing with matters of belief,... with an exciting chase, a touch of mystery and a science fiction sub-text, an exploration of Appalachian life,... a good read," has been published very recently by FANTASTIC BOOKS and is available from Amazon for $23.79 hardcover, $19.99 trade paperback and from Barnes and Noble for 23.99 in hardcover, $21.59 members price, $19.99 trade paperback. It is also available at local book stores for $29.99 hardcover, $19.99 trade paperback. A third novel has also been printed for sale distribution in this new year and is available through the same sources. The Amherst [MA] Women's Book Club has chosen The Serpent and the Hummingbird as its May selection and the author will be discussing his book with them. He's also available elsewhere; just contact him at wilsonroberts@hotmail.com for scheduling.
"Wilson Roberts’ The Serpent and the Hummingbird is both engaging crime fiction and insightful philosophical novel, a dichotomy full of imagistic dichotomies, beginning with its title and including metaphorical antitheses, among others, of cars, musical instruments, road signs, country singers, cultural settings, novels, cities, rivers, and birds.... The philosophical narrative sets forth even a more complicated mystery, that of faith—in all beliefs: Islam, mainstream Christianity, Pentecostal Holiness, mythic Goddess adoration, atheism (faith in God’s absence), agnosticism (insufficient faith to believe), extraterrestrial beings, scientific perfectibility, the past/the present, the reason/the spirit, the seen/the unseen, and fields of dreams and visions. Each faith has its own persona in the novel, its own unfathomable mystery to another person, and its own potential ambivalent shadow (the grace of the hummingbird’s shadow and the devastation of the hawk’s). Almost all of the novel’s personae are changed in diverse ways by the possession, loss, or pursuit of faith—one notable exception being Rearview Man with the mirror on his bicycle hat, 'unchanged, as all who look only behind them.'... On Holiness Serpent Handling [this is] a fine job, certainly the very best I've read in a fictional context. [Roberts has] sensitively, empathetically presented fictional characters who are exemplary representative of believers while avoiding all the pitfalls of stereotypes. In Norma Jean…you have…the essence of the Holiness serpent handler in an aesthetic form that is credible, realistic, and insightful…[with] statements [about] faith that are profound.”
-- Thomas Burton, emeritus Professor and Founder of of Appalachian Studies Department, East Tennessee State University, Johnson City
”…an exciting book for a cold winter evening.”
-- Irmarie Jones for The Recorder, Greenfield MA
Wil's latest novel to be published is Incident on Tuckerman Court (Barnes and Noble with the best paperback price at $10.79, and Amazon best for the hardcover at $20.53).
"Set in a small town in the northernmost part of the Pioneer Valley area of western Massachusetts, Wilson Roberts' third novel, Incident on Tuckerman Court is a tale of love confounded by bizarre forms of betrayal and friendship. One morning at breakfast, University of Massachusetts professor Thomas Rutherford's physician wife, Jan Travis, changes the course of their lives by revealing a profound change of heart. Frightened and disoriented by this revelation, Rutherford walks outside to gather his wits and is attacked on the street in front of his home by two men who beat him mercilessly, leaving him blind in one eye. The ground of his marriage dropping away beneath him, Rutherford is forced to live in a suddenly two-dimensional world where everything he holds dear is vulnerable. His marriage, his daughter Miriam's safety, his job, the security of life in his small shire town and his grasp on reality are threatened when one of his attackers returns. The mysterious Joseph speaks of remorse for the attack and vows an undying friendship that drives Rutherford to the edge of desperation as he fends off Joseph's many poses and varying personalities. Readers will be amused by Roberts' picture of small town life in the midst of economic recession as they follow Thomas Rutherford's fear and confusion right up to the story's final words. Incident on Tuckerman Court gives a perverse twist to Flannery O'Connor's use of the grotesque in the service of faith." -- from the hardcover book jacket
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With an undergraduate degree in Theology from Madison NJ's former Drew Theological Seminary and a master's in English from Boone NC's Appalachian State University,
father and grandfather Wilson Roberts is now a retired Mountain Empire professor and English Literature Department chairperson, former union organizer and activist, published author, musician/songwriter, Court advocate for children, long-time personal friend of the publisher and supporter/contributor of ACR with previous work saved in the site's 
Wil's latest novel to be published is Incident on Tuckerman Court (Barnes and Noble with the best paperback price at $10.79, and Amazon best for the hardcover at $20.53).
