News from Cicely Flags
News from Cicely
Flags
Well, it's been a quiet week in Cicely, Alaska, where the light has been doing what late May tells it to do, which is more or less whatever it wants. By four in the morning it is already pale gold along the ridge, and by nine at night it is still that same gold, a little lower, a little softer, and you would swear it had not moved at all if you weren't watching carefully, which most of us aren't, because we have things to attend to.
Darlene was up before the light on Monday, which is saying something this time of year. She had the flags out by five, every one of them, along the main road and down the side streets and one at the corner by Ruth-Ann's that she's been planting in the same hole for nineteen years. She does not talk much about this. She gets up, she puts them out, and she is back inside before the coffee is done. Some things you do because you decided to do them once and that decision holds, and this is one of those.
The cemetery on the hill was quiet all morning, which is its normal condition, and then Reverend Brown's truck came rattling up the road around ten, him passing through on his circuit, which he arranged this year to bring him through Cicely on this particular Monday. He stood at the fence for a while by himself. Then he came down for coffee at The Brick and said it was a beautiful morning, which it was, and that was about all he said about it.
Sycamore Jim was holding court from his usual stool, as he does, and at some point in the mid-morning he got to telling about a man named Dale Corcoran, who had been a trapper and an amateur cartographer and who had died in the early eighties before most of the people in the room had come to Cicely, including Jim himself, which did not stop him from talking about the man as though he'd been a close personal friend. "Dale knew this country," Jim said, to nobody in particular and everybody in general. "He could read a hillside the way you'd read a sentence." Nobody asked him to continue. He did anyway.
Bob was there, which he always is on a Tuesday, though this was a Monday, because the holiday moved his schedule one notch to the right and he adjusted without comment. He sat in the back booth and listened to Jim's story about Dale Corcoran, and at the end of it he nodded once, slowly, the way he nods when something is true enough to acknowledge. That was his contribution. It was, as his contributions often are, sufficient.
Vera and Alma walked up to the cemetery in the afternoon, taking their time with the hill because the hill is not getting any shorter. Vera brought flowers from the tin she keeps by the stove, and Alma brought a pocket full of worry beads she works when she is thinking. They stood at several graves without saying much. After a while Alma said the names quietly, not to anyone in particular, just saying them into the air, which is as good a place as any for a name to go. Vera did not interrupt. This may be the only subject on which she consistently does not.
Linnea brought her students up in the morning, all eleven of them, and they stood in a row at the cemetery fence and she talked to them about why the flags were there. She has been doing this for six years and every year she tries to find a different way in, a different angle, because the children change and the right words for a ten-year-old are not the right words for a seven-year-old, and she is always searching for the sentence that makes it real without making it frightening. She has not found it yet, but she keeps looking, and the looking is probably most of the work.
The thing about a small town and its dead is that the dead are not abstract. There is no wall to stand at from a distance. The names are on the mailboxes you pass on your way to the store, on the street you grew up on, in the stories
Sycamore Jim tells to whoever is in range. The distance you need to grieve at a respectful distance does not exist here. The loss is just part of the geography, and you navigate around it the same way you navigate around everything else in Cicely, which is carefully, and not always successfully, and with a certain understanding that the country is bigger than you are and has its own ideas about things.
By evening the flags were still out, catching what breeze there was, which was not much. The light was still doing what late May tells it to do. Down at The Brick, Coop bought a round for the table and nobody asked him why, because some gestures answer their own questions.
Johnny Tumbleweed had the radio on in his shed by the airstrip, high lonesome coming through the walls, and Emmylou was on the windowsill looking at the light on the ridge the way cats look at things, which is with complete attention and no explanation.
Darlene brought the flags in at ten, just before the light finally made its decision to become dark for a few hours. She shook each one out, folded it the way she was taught to fold it, and set it in the box for next year. The hole by Ruth-Ann's will be there. The flags will go back in. And the names will still be the names they always were, which is the thing about names, the one good thing: they keep.
That's the news from Cicely, Alaska, where the light does what it wants, the road does what it can, and the people do the best they know how.
DJ VVolf · KBHR 570
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