From Professor Lucas I got an A. He was open to a student swaddled in psychic pain, and fatally enraptured by a clock made of splinters. Professor Lucas did not break the bottle to remove my paper as I hoped he would—the empty bottle was still intact on his desk when we consulted—but in many other ways this special teacher understood what I was getting at.

 

Within the year I left Iowa to attend the graduate writing workshop at New York University. I had never been east of Chicago before, but the unknown was much less daunting and confusing than what I knew existed in the Midwest. Soon after arrival I stunned my ambitious classmates by revealing I was reading not Raymond Carver or Mona Simpson in Vintage Contemporary editions, but flaking copies of the novels Horatio Alger wrote to inspire poor boys of the 1800s to lives of industry and honesty. Ragged Dick was my favorite. It was, I claimed, his Moby Dick.

To this day I forge forward backwardly. The richness and turbulence of childhood intervenes in adulthood with the greatest frequency. And those interruptions—furious or banal—give rise to the notion that a life hardly fits in a life. That each human vessel overflows with experiences instead of neatly containing them. We are left, then, to grab at what bobs to the surface.

I was born on a battlefield in the middle of a battle. My father was a general. My mother was a nurse. While bombs exploded overhead she lay in a trench giving birth to me. Her screams commingling with the screams of soldiers shot through the gut or leg. Her bare feet held in place by the gentle boots of two young volunteers. These men felt every push, felt it up their spine. Every so often my father would gallop over to see how she was doing. Without getting off his brown horse he would look down at my mother writhing in the browner mud. The handkerchiefs donated for her comfort had long since disappeared. Each contraction drove her deeper into the muck, digging a trench shaped as she was shaped. She was unconscious when I was born. The cord was cut with barbed wire and I was handed up toward the horse.

The word memoir has always sounded to me like a hairdo I not only cannot but would not want to afford. I think of this paragraph as a fitting prelude to River Bend Chronicle.