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SHORTS

For those of you who came to this page expecting to find long tanned legs and tight cute buns...our apologies.

Not that kind of Shorts.

No, these are short stories and short commentaries written by Isnala Mani over a lifetime of being an observer and reporter of the human condition. He never claimed to be a creative writer...just a reporter. Most of the stories are true...sort of. If you ever wonder what is true in them I leave you with this:

It is not important if the things we remember happened as we remember them
or even if they happened at all. The importance lies in the truths that we
learned from believing the stories.

THE HIGH LONESOME

THE HOPE SPRINGS ETERNAL REST FUNERAL AND CEMETERY SOCIETY OF HOPE SPRINGS, ARKANSAS

Out here they call it a lot of things, these High Plains of Texas. It's called the Llano Estacado...Staked Plains. Land so flat that the Spanish gold-seekers had to drive stakes into the ground to find their bearings. No mountains to reference, no trees or rivers to mark on their maps....just thousands of miles of nothing at all. Some just call it the High Plains and shrug at the harshness and terrible beauty of it. They work the land and the land works them. Both lose and both win and in the end the man is gone and the plains remain forever.

The Comanche and the buffalo were once here. Now the rancher and the hard-scrabble farmer and the oilman are here. In time they, too, will disappear. A wolf sometimes...maybe...maybe just the memory of a wolf appears on the edge of your consciousness. Only the unchallenged wind and the cruel sun remain in the summer. In winter there is only the bone-breaking wind off the glaciers, nothing to inhibit their howling harshness.

Those who travel this land...the truckers and the cowboys and the hobos and the drifters...they call it the High Lonesome. A man can easily travel all day and all night without ever seeing another human being. Creatures seek others of their kind. Standing at the edge of nothing or in the middle of it there is that feeling of overwhelming alone-ness. The sun is so high at mid-day...you can imagine that, if the sun could see at all, it could not see you. A man is overwhelmed by a sense of his own insignificance. So many miles, so many winds, so much sun or ice...and only you in your smallness. Solitude...so often sought...becomes a curse. A man becomes disoriented...there are no cardinal directions...no landmarks...nothing that is familiar. It becomes impossible to not believe...that you are the last person left alive on earth. Some mistake this for loneliness. It isn't really, of course. It's just lonesome-ness.

Loneliness is something else altogether.

THE HOPE SPRINGS ETERNAL REST FUNERAL AND CEMETERY SOCIETY OF HOPE SPRINGS, ARKANSAS

Just by way of introduction and so that you will know the veracity of what I'm about to tell you I want to say that I am probably the only person who has ever left Hope Springs, Arkansas...and returned. You see, I was brought up here. Raised, as they say in this part of the South. Almost everyone leaves this town of some fifteen hundred souls...more or less...after high school. The Friday night football heroes and the cheerleaders all go away to some college...probably not in Arkansas...and are pretty much never heard from again except for summer reunions and an occasional Christmas visit. I did the same...up to a point. Four years at Northwestern University in Illinois stretched into six followed by several years reporting for a major newspaper. A little maturity and a PhD made some people think that I could teach others to be newspaper reporters.

I suppose that I was doing "right well" as they say around here. Pretty wife, new cars, sweet children... Well, as sometimes happens, the wife discovered a need to find herself. She left for other parts taking the sweet children who, surprisingly quickly, became busy growing up and making new friends, a circle that did not very often include dear old Dad. The walls closed in and I realized that what I missed most was being a newspaperman. I headed south and ended up back here in Hope Springs. The local paper had been failing for years and the one-man editorial/reportage/production crew was more than happy to take my money and head even further south to a retirement community in Florida where I am sure he is delighting the other retirees with the tale of how he conned that Yankee fella into buying the remains of his business. I somehow neglected to tell him that I had been born and raised in Hope Springs. Likewise, and for much the same reason, I failed to divulge to anyone that I could legally put the letters PhD after my name. To my relief no one seemed to remember the skinny kid who left here so many years ago nor connect that memory to the middle-aged, slightly greying gentleman who came to them from somewhere Up North. No point in antagonizing the people who I expected to buy advertising space in my paper. In a small and failing town in Arkansas selling advertising was somewhat problematical. There were the payments from the city and county for running the items that they had to provide to the public as a matter of law and a smattering of ads from the locals...enough to make it possible to put the paper out six days a week. No Sunday paper. Couldn't afford to publish it and not enough news to make it look a whole lot different from the rest of the week's offerings anyway.

So, now that you know who I am, I will get on with this tale of the good Doctor Williams and the Hope Springs Eternal Rest, etc.

Dr. Ezell Williams had appeared in Hope Springs shortly after I left. Not much was known about him and he offered little. The folks knew that they needed a doctor, the last one having given up after a few years. The zeal of Hippocrates had given way to a desire to make a decent living and the young internist had moved to Memphis where he is probably now a member of the country club and driving a Mercedes. Before him there had been old Doc Taylor, a man of considerable talent with human or equine patients and seemingly little need for fame or fortune. His great and patient heart finally gave out and that was when the city fathers searched the medical schools and enticed the younger man into setting up his practice in Hope Springs. Like I said, it didn't take long for compassion and self-denial to wear thin. Almost as he was leaving E. Williams appeared.

Dr. Williams held a medical degree from Loyola in New Orleans which made him an acceptable son of the South and some experience in the public health sector. He looked the town over, noting, I am sure, the somewhat limited potential for profit-making and the generally downward trending of the local economy. He drank coffee at Patty's on the square and chatted with the farmers and the unemployed and the boys from Roy Ingram's tire store. He nodded politely to everyone he met on the sidewalks and on the country roads he lifted two fingers off the steering wheel in the universal country greeting. By the time the city fathers got around to propositioning him he was already an accepted figure around town.

And a fairly imposing and dignified figure he was too. Ezell was over six feet tall, broad shouldered and straight. He had black wavy hair and eyes so dark that their brown was sometimes taken for black. He was tanned and healthy any time of year. And, most importantly, although he probably never believed the civic hype about potential prosperity, he was willing to practice in a town where he was as likely to be paid in chickens and eggs as he was to not be paid at all. That was certainly an important qualifier.

Folks were a little slow warming up to him at first. Maybe they were still a little bitter about the defection to financial respectability of the former doctor. Once he got rid of his Chrysler and bought a truck, once he cleaned up the rooms above his office, once he joined the school board and the historical society, people started bringing him their complaints and injuries and his office was busy most of the time. While it was true that he was reluctant to treat sick mules or infertile cows the town's children routinely brought him their sick kittens or injured puppies and he made friends with both the pets and the owners. He was skilled, compassionate...and always available. The bell that rang at the door of his office also rang in the quarters above the office.

With the certainty that lives within southern women that no man should be alone, the towns dames set out to correct the unfortunate lack of a woman in the life of Dr. Williams. In the most decorous and dignified manner they trapped him in conversation with every available and appropriate match in town. Generally speaking, although he was polite and even courtly with these widows and spinsters, there was no hint of a possible mating. There might be a few very public and well-chaperoned dates but no follow-up on his part. The doctor seemed content to live his solitary life above his office although he was no recluse. He was active in civic endeavors and always the first to volunteer for any worthwhile cause.

It was known of him that he regularly went to Little Rock on personal business...seemed like a standing monthly appointment. Speculation abounded. A woman? A Wife even? Some sort of business deal that made it possible for him to live on such slim pickings as were available from the ill and injured of Hope Springs? There was a lot of talk but no one thought that there was anything sinister about it. They had come to love their doctor and friend. As Sheriff McCaully said...whatever it was, it was his business and none of theirs.

It became their business one April day when the county judge happened to be in Little Rock on county business at the same time as Dr. Williams' visit to a medical clinic on the north side of town. Now, Judge Rank could probably have seen the doctor going into the clinic and passed it off as a professional sort of thing and thought no more of it. Unfortunately for Ezell Williams' privacy Judge Rank had his wife, Judith, with him on this particular visit. She had wanted to see her married daughter, the one who had married the roads and bridges engineer and who lived in Little Rock. Judith, as was her way, just couldn't let go of what she had seen. She fretted about it all the way home and had the poor judge so rattled and upset that he had his first ever attack of indigestion. He advised her, begged her, finally threatened her to let it go and leave the poor man in peace. This she was constitutionally unsuited to do.

Judith was a digger...hand her that. If I had needed a snoopy reporter and been able to afford one I would have taken her on as chief of research. She questioned Lloyd Brooks, the barber, every time she saw Doc Williams leaving after a haircut. Meeting him on the street she never failed to ask how he had enjoyed his "day off". Although she couldn't approach the men at Patty's she could, and did, pump Patty for anything she might have picked up from the table talk. There was never anything but Judith kept on asking. It almost became a game between the judge's wife and the quietly good-natured doctor. It would prove to be a game that Doc Williams would not win.

We had noticed in the past few months that Doc was not looking as fit as usual. His visits to Little Rock had increased in frequency. For the first time one day last winter he had even closed his office on account of illness...his own. Once again speculation ran rampant through the town amply fueled by Judith Rank. Doc had a touch of silver at his temples but we all considered him a youngish middle-aged man, no one that you would expect to be seriously ill.

And then it happened. A visit to Little Rock. Several days with no return. Then word from Doc's personal physician, the one he had been seeing on those visits, that he was hospitalized. The town waited in stunned suspension. A few weeks later the physician called me so that I could put the announcement in the paper...Doc Williams had died. The cause of death was an unspecified blood disorder. The doctor would explain more later.

Writing that news story was one of the hardest things I have ever had to do. I loved the man as much as anyone in town did. I had shared coffee and the very occasional beer with him. We had talked as fellow outsiders who were becoming accepted members of the tribe. We shared bonds of professionalism and education and having lived somewhere else. Now I had the sad duty of announcing to the town that one of their favorite people was gone. I wrote the story through tears that blurred the words, set it and edged it in black. The paper hit the street earlier than usual that day.

Almost before the ink dried on the page the Hope Springs Eternal Rest Funeral and Cemetery Society of Hope Springs, Arkansas sprang into action. No one doubted that the burial would be in Hope Springs and a call later in the day from Dr. Daniels in Little Rock verified that this had, indeed, been Ezell Williams' wish. The town was hung with black bunting that had last seen the light of day when the last southern Civil War veteran had died many years earlier. Placards appeared in every store window in his memory. It was announced that, although school could not be canceled because of some law or another, students attending the chapel or graveside service would not be counted absent. The VFW would send a rifle squad. The sheriff and his deputy would appear in dress uniform. No one had ever seen their dress uniforms and looked forward to seeing them.

The day of the funeral saw more folks in town than anyone could ever remember. Seemed like the whole county turned out. Farmers left their fields on that June day, rounded up their wives and kids and headed into town in their rusty pickups. Shop owners shut their businesses, the city offices closed. The usual small gang of ne'er do wells abandoned the county line saloons and looked almost presentable shuffling their feet uncomfortably in the red dirt of the cemetery. I had said in the sad announcement of his death that he was survived by his mother, Claire Williams of New Orleans. Everyone watched for her, wanting to say a word of consolation to the mother of someone they had also loved, but there was no one they thought might have been her.

I wandered through the crowd waiting for the casket to be brought to the place where the earth had been opened to receive it. I was doing what newspapermen do; listening. What I heard over and over again made my throat constrict and my eyes sting. There was the old farmer whose son had raced into town in the small hours of the morning to fetch the doc for his daddy's gall bladder attack. There was the young black woman with whom Doc had sat up all night praying for the repose of the soul of her dying mother. There were the children whose pets had been saved or buried by the kindly doctor who had later bought the children ice cream. There was the young wife who had supposed herself infertile until Doc had a talk with her husband. There were a hundred stories of debts owed that could never be repaid.

Lloyd and Roy and the sheriff and a few others were standing a little apart from the others near the fence. They were the core and the heart of the Cemetery Society and, as such, were sort of overseeing the proceedings. As I walked up on them Lloyd was considering the Negro Cemetery on the other side of the fence and saying what a shame it was that those people didn't take better care of their own. Made the "real" cemetery...the one where only caucasian people could be planted...look bad. All agreed. The sheriff commented that if blacks had been allowed to be buried in the regular cemetery it would probably look like that also. Of course that could never happen. The charter of the Society, approved back in 1858, prohibited such race-mixing among the dead.

I smiled at the boys and nodded toward the open pit where the preacher had arrived and was preparing to greet the mourners and say his words of comfort and praise. The boys took one last chug from the pint of Bourbon DeLuxe they were sharing, straightened their unaccustomed neckties and ambled over to the tent. I positioned myself so that I had a good view of the entire crowd. I saw their expressions when the preacher reached for the hand of Claire Williams, offering soft words of comfort.

When that bereaved, dignified black woman took the preacher's hand my eyes were on the crowd. After all my education, after all my years of writing....I could not describe what I saw. The confusion...the horror on some faces...the anger at the assumed betrayal...dismay...utter and profound confusion. Blacks and whites alike stunned and speechless.

Love won the day. The burial service was beautiful. Many people approached Doc's mother after the service and offered condolences. Judith put her arm around Claire's shoulders and hugged her and they shared tears over their loss.

Looking back on it now from the perspective of a little time...a little older now, a little more grey and perhaps approaching some sort of wisdom...I think maybe I understand what I saw that day at the cemetery. It was something about death...about the death of an accepted way of life and a tradition...the death of long-held but untested beliefs. An entire generation had passed into history. Not to be forgotten or disrespected but to be honored for the courage of their beliefs and the strength of their character. They had acted with honor to the best of their knowledge and ability.

While it was something about death maybe it was also something about life. Sometimes life comes from death. Somehow part of the cycle of things...that some things must die away to make it possible for new things to come into life. One man's life made so many other lives better. Maybe it took his death to make it better for all of us. When we stop learning we begin dying. This town had been dying for a long time. Maybe now it can live again.

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