ISSUES | fall 1999

“An Alphabet of Lessons for Girls”
“John Winthrop, ‘Reasons to be Considered for…the Intended Plantation in England,’ 1629”
“Witness Tree”
“Witch Research: The Essex County Museum”
“Testimony: The Parris House”
“Testimony: Escape, July 30, 1692”

Rebucca Tull her name was when she moved here. She was the daughter of a preacher from the Shenandoah Valley, from a town and a church more refined than what she had to face on this back-of-beyond North Carolina mountain. I was about eleven or twelve. I was at the house-raising for the family, which was just Rebecca, her Virginia preacher father, and her mother.

Interviewer: Your stories and novels cover a lot of ground, historically and geographically. Accordion Crimes, for example, is set all over the United States and spans much of the twentieth century.Postcards concerns World…    read more

Dr. Buchner sits on a white bench in a well-kept garden in the town of Dimmsdorf, on the grounds of the nursing home where he has lived for the past four years, since the heart attack that nearly killed him in 1980.

He kept to himself on the ferry, going up the Sacramento from San Francisco. A lot of the other men on board had partners or were striking up friendships. He’d volunteered his name and home state, Hy Hopgoode, Iowa, to a couple of men from Florida who sat next to him on the top deck, but he let it drop after that. He didn’t mention that he’d been here in California before. When the ferry docked the next day at Sacramento City, most of the passengers headed toward the outfitters for supplies, buying so much it seemed they were expecting the diggings to be right at hand, like they’d only have to carry their heavy packs a couple of miles. He knew better but still overloaded himself with food and equipment before heading up the road.

“Song of Arrows”
“Jungle Jim”
“Juice”
“Valentine from Indian Country”

I could only see the dim lights of the harbor we had just left, and the black sky above us, darker than pitch. A cold wind was blowing in the dark sky above; it was about to rain. We felt suffocated, despite the wind and the cold. By “we” I mean we sailors who stood in the hold.

“Brilliance”
“A Little Respect”

It was a long time ago, just a few years after the end of World War II, and there I was, a bride in the mist-wrapped, sodden-aired, graying and bombed-out Vicenza in the north of Italy.

Sir:

I was there at the death of your dead boy Clinch and though I did not see his killing, me and your dead boy killed for 2 days here in Nth Georgia, but your Clinch lived only 1 and 1 half days of it, him denouncing the while till he met his end.

Even after the night of gunfire and cannon, of surging, drunken crowds on Market and Water Streets, all down the river front; after flares and rockets; even after the box-shaped gunboat finished thumping bursts of fire and black mounds of smoke, men still staggered under the Weitzers’ window and paused at the visage of the brown Mississippi River.

The house creaked and the flames of the Advent candles danced in the draft from a gale wind coming off the bay. Two days before Christmas and they were at dinner, Ellen serving, Mother and Papa, Uncle Pete and Aunt Daria and Jan herself, sitting across from the promising Mr. Ted Phillips, one of Papa’s engineers. His flight home had been postponed due to the weather, and Papa had asked him to dinner.

“Elizabeth: a sailor’s wife”
“her husband”
“Elizabeth”
“a prostitute”
“a soldier”
“the cook”
“a soldier”
“the doctor’s journal”
“Elizabeth”