Calligraphy
By Doug Ramspeck

          It was a summer of interrogations.  The cornfields interrogated

the sky, and the rain that fell in the late afternoons darkened the stones

         .by the lake.  Our mother had gone to St. Paul to stay with her sister,

 and our father spoke of Sieger, Wetzler, Fulda, Suhl, Limburg.

         At night I was preoccupied by the sounds of the trains growing closer

and closer on the ridge, as though they had a question they meant to ask,

        .or I would think about the girl I’d never liked at the farm house

down the road.   Sometimes our mother phoned us in the evenings,

         and our father’s voice grew impatient with interrogatories,.

and my brother and I wandered down by the lake to watch

         the mosquitoes rising like mysterious calligraphy from the grass..

The young bullsnake we found was only about a foot long.

         My brother gripped it by the tail and swung it.  The girl’s freckles

were red ants and her skin was pale as curdled milk.  In the evenings

         our father whispered how much he’d loved kartoffelsalat, roulade,

and stollen as a boy.  The girl was Catholic.  One Ash Wednesday

         we saw the gray smudge on her forehead.  She followed us.

She knocked on our door and begged to play.  At the funeral our mother wore

         a dark dress and told us to stop asking questions.  Our father told us

we would take boat rides on the Main River in Frankfurt.  The girl’s nosebleeds

         were so frequent we would tease her she was having her first period

through her nose.  The snake went flying as a spirit snake, as a sprung

        rubberband, as a train rumbling on the ridge late at night.

 Once we shot a squirrel, skinned it, and left its bloodied body in the basket

        of the girl’s bicycle by her father’s barn.  On the phone I told my mother

about the bullsnake.   Sometimes I saw the girl’s mother or father

        or younger sister fetching mail from the mailbox or retrieving the

newspaper or pulling out of the driveway in a car.  The rain was heavy

        in the afternoons, staining the stones until they appeared

dark and slippery by the lake.  Our father spoke German long distance

        and waved one arm in the air as strange calligraphy.  We asked him

when our mother was coming back.  My brother asked if it killed a snake

        to throw it, even if afterwards it wriggled off.  I asked what if felt like

to be nine, a girl no one liked, and struck by a mail truck.  

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