Wherein Indian Joseph has taken a bus canoe from Millport to Madison.Thus begins another version of one continuing saga.
Madison, it was but two years ago in this very same place that Joseph and his sisters were surrendered by poor troubled young Mother Anais and Grandmother Emmaline to the state foster home system. Anais suffering post traumatic conditions from the nightmarish scenarios of being mismatched and married to the older and much meaner Benito with her being only but a young girl fated to be cast into such harsh and unkind desert whirlwinds.. There was not enough money or space to care for the offspring of such an ill fated pairing, there was more to the story perhaps than clumsily chosen words and phrases are able to faithfully tell.
It goes way back. It always goes so far away, one may never know the actual details.
Emmaline and her first husband Jean Louis lived with their five offspring in the hollows of Hickman County Tennessee near the quaint little town of Good Water.
Jean Louis worked as a lumberjack, helping progress to scalp the native land of hair. Hills were bristling with old growth in those days of yore. He indulged in the pleasures of drink frequently, Firewater my friend, spring of the Devil.They were hewing an existence from the earth, water soil of this sometimes generous sometimes selfish land, People of faith, simple and powerful. People lost in a new wilderness, haunted always by the old. Anais was the eldest girl child of Emmaline and Louis. Emmaline of hardy English, Irish stock receding into historical mists of Old Country. Jean Louis of French and native American blood, wild spirited and of questionable character in the area of being a responsible husband and father. Anais has one older brother, a younger brother and two younger sisters. Theirs was a basic down to earth life with few of the frills offered by city and civilisation. Perhaps Cormac McCarthy would have recognized them as prototypes or archetypes, the sort of individuals that formed the fabric of a transitory agrarian region caught up in the manic threshing machine known euphemistically as The West. Human fodder and immortal souls thrown into a constant flux and flail.
Fathers, Mothers, Children. Family lines spiraling back down through the ages. All the faces, bodies, schools of thought, actions wished and taken. Kinetic. Implied. Otherwise and elsewhere.
Anais gifted with beauty and innocence born of faithful Christian Emmaline and firewater acolyte Jean Louis somewhere in a shaded hollow glade of a time by-gone. The Devil is sending a man for her in a scant few years, a man with soul forfeit. Just another Cain branded with the mark of the fallen. The fallen are fiendish and clever.God help the future. May God save us all. For this man would be named Benito. Joseph and his sisters were to be the next round of beings to join a mad spiraling dance of mortality. Big deal. Let’s go.
Problems in the family unit:
Hard times in the hollow. Emmaline tries her best, which is really a very good best to care for her five children in a post depression era. Post War prosperity hasn’t found their rural niche roost yet and probably won’t until long after everyone alive has moved a spot or soon on down the great loop to a sky kingdom somewhere or some such metanalogy.
Jean Louis has disappeared. Deserted? Maybe. Run off with a traveling medicine show headed out West to another Great Sunset. Joined up with paper cap gun slingers, rum runners and ghost lands speculators.
Emmaline is left to her own devices, which although considerable are not quite enough to keep the kids well fed and clothed.
One bright morning Emmaline is down by the creek washing a plucked rooster when a man with a supernaturally straight back carrying a heavy railroad tie on a broad shoulder walks by on the path alongside the creek. This classic midwestern gothic character named Popeye Woodsie is destined to become Emmaline’s second husband.
Popeye: Howdy ‘Mam, looks like you have washed all the feathers off that bird.
Emmaline: Well, wish I had more birds to wash, with five hungry mouths at home to feed, this scrawny thing won’t last past supper.
Popeye: I do admire a woman with some gumption. Name’s Woodsie, Popeye Woodsie.
Emmaline: Why I’m Emmaline Langley, pleased to meet you Mr. Popeye.
(Who are all these people? Players and actors upon a hardscrabble bone country stage. The DNA of settlers, wild country pioneers still marched in time through their earnest hard fought blood.) These all were the ones who came before the story of Indian Joseph and his painted warbonnet of many colors. Emmaline, Anais, Jean Louis and whoever it was that claimed Devil's Disciple Benito as his son.(Benito was always disinclined to share particulars of his forebears with Anais and the children. No one understood exactly why. Perhaps there were secrets too dark to tell in this man’s past. It didn’t seem to matter at the time. Rage is rage and cruel is cruel as mean is mean
.
Meanwhile the World goes on much the same as ever. Now it’s Indian Joseph’s turn to get a little crazy. He’s starting in the middle of the 8th grade at Neely’s Bend Jr. High School in the quaint mid sixties burgh of Madison Tennessee. It all seems like broken segments of a randomly recollected fever dream in retrospect. Interesting, this might be fun.
Walking into his first day at a new school. Going from midstate New York to midstate Tennessee is a bit like time travel or stepping through a mystic wormhole from one universe into another. There are mirrors everywhere. The irony is how in the world do you see yourself?
For one thing his hair is too long for this sixties midsouthern environment, at least from the principal Goshen’s point of view. Also the big Iron Cross on a choke collar chain he wears around his neck, a piece of personal expression he traded a comic book to a kid for back in Millport world raises a few one dimensional eyebrows in the ‘new’ school.
Later the Boho art teacher Ms. Inkwell, who has taken a fancy to our young Native tells Joseph that the principal had called a teachers staff meeting about this possible problem student.
Goshen: This kid from New York looks like trouble. I think he may have been in a gang with long hair and all. He wears that Iron Cross necklace with the big silver dog chain. I should have him searched to see if he’s carrying a weapon, a switchblade or brass knuckles. This is a threat to the safety of our school.
Inkwell: He’s probably just trying to express individuality. The boy’s only 13 years old.
Goshen: Something’s off about that kid. He just doesn’t seem to fit in with the rest of our children. I am concerned with everyones' safety.
Inkwell rolls her mascaraed eyes and lets out a quiet laugh under her breath.
(Note: In every present moment every past moment is also contained as a metaphor, like the parts of an atom. It’s a matter of composition and scale. Sci-fi stuff.
[1]
The Nucleus
Core center: The dense middle part of the atom.
Mass holder: Contains over 99.9% of the atom's total mass.
Composition: Made of protons and neutrons packed tightly together. [Past.Present]
Protons
Location: Found inside the nucleus.
Charge: Carry a positive (+) electrical charge.
Identity: The number of protons decides what chemical element the atom is (for example, one proton makes hydrogen). [Present.Past]
Neutrons
Location: Found inside the nucleus alongside protons.
Charge: Carry no electrical charge (they are neutral).
Weight: Have nearly the same mass as a proton, helping to stabilize the nucleus. [Future]
Electrons
Location: Spin around the nucleus in outer regions called shells or an electron cloud.
Charge: Carry a negative (-) electrical charge.
Size: Are extremely tiny and light, weighing about 1/1,840 of a proton[Memory]
Indian Joseph is a teenage Atom now. A particle of semiotic mass consciousness.
All the time in the world ahead. Too many chemical chain reactions dominate the adolescent phase in a molecular present.
Kind of quarky for just the 8th grade and all, but youth feels too impetuous to be denied itself over a few random time factors.
Ah yes Time? Time to show Neely’s Bend Jr. High, a wild young Indian Joseph playing warpath atomic relative scales.
Poetry by Chaucer Whethers
Read 79 times
Written on 2026-09-24 at 19:43
Save as a bookmark (requires login)
Write a comment (requires login)
Send as email (requires login)
Print text
Concerning Grandmother Emmaline
Madison, it was but two years ago in this very same place that Joseph and his sisters were surrendered by poor troubled young Mother Anais and Grandmother Emmaline to the state foster home system. Anais suffering post traumatic conditions from the nightmarish scenarios of being mismatched and married to the older and much meaner Benito with her being only but a young girl fated to be cast into such harsh and unkind desert whirlwinds.. There was not enough money or space to care for the offspring of such an ill fated pairing, there was more to the story perhaps than clumsily chosen words and phrases are able to faithfully tell.
It goes way back. It always goes so far away, one may never know the actual details.
Emmaline and her first husband Jean Louis lived with their five offspring in the hollows of Hickman County Tennessee near the quaint little town of Good Water.
Jean Louis worked as a lumberjack, helping progress to scalp the native land of hair. Hills were bristling with old growth in those days of yore. He indulged in the pleasures of drink frequently, Firewater my friend, spring of the Devil.They were hewing an existence from the earth, water soil of this sometimes generous sometimes selfish land, People of faith, simple and powerful. People lost in a new wilderness, haunted always by the old. Anais was the eldest girl child of Emmaline and Louis. Emmaline of hardy English, Irish stock receding into historical mists of Old Country. Jean Louis of French and native American blood, wild spirited and of questionable character in the area of being a responsible husband and father. Anais has one older brother, a younger brother and two younger sisters. Theirs was a basic down to earth life with few of the frills offered by city and civilisation. Perhaps Cormac McCarthy would have recognized them as prototypes or archetypes, the sort of individuals that formed the fabric of a transitory agrarian region caught up in the manic threshing machine known euphemistically as The West. Human fodder and immortal souls thrown into a constant flux and flail.
Fathers, Mothers, Children. Family lines spiraling back down through the ages. All the faces, bodies, schools of thought, actions wished and taken. Kinetic. Implied. Otherwise and elsewhere.
Anais gifted with beauty and innocence born of faithful Christian Emmaline and firewater acolyte Jean Louis somewhere in a shaded hollow glade of a time by-gone. The Devil is sending a man for her in a scant few years, a man with soul forfeit. Just another Cain branded with the mark of the fallen. The fallen are fiendish and clever.God help the future. May God save us all. For this man would be named Benito. Joseph and his sisters were to be the next round of beings to join a mad spiraling dance of mortality. Big deal. Let’s go.
Problems in the family unit:
Hard times in the hollow. Emmaline tries her best, which is really a very good best to care for her five children in a post depression era. Post War prosperity hasn’t found their rural niche roost yet and probably won’t until long after everyone alive has moved a spot or soon on down the great loop to a sky kingdom somewhere or some such metanalogy.
Jean Louis has disappeared. Deserted? Maybe. Run off with a traveling medicine show headed out West to another Great Sunset. Joined up with paper cap gun slingers, rum runners and ghost lands speculators.
Emmaline is left to her own devices, which although considerable are not quite enough to keep the kids well fed and clothed.
One bright morning Emmaline is down by the creek washing a plucked rooster when a man with a supernaturally straight back carrying a heavy railroad tie on a broad shoulder walks by on the path alongside the creek. This classic midwestern gothic character named Popeye Woodsie is destined to become Emmaline’s second husband.
Popeye: Howdy ‘Mam, looks like you have washed all the feathers off that bird.
Emmaline: Well, wish I had more birds to wash, with five hungry mouths at home to feed, this scrawny thing won’t last past supper.
Popeye: I do admire a woman with some gumption. Name’s Woodsie, Popeye Woodsie.
Emmaline: Why I’m Emmaline Langley, pleased to meet you Mr. Popeye.
(Who are all these people? Players and actors upon a hardscrabble bone country stage. The DNA of settlers, wild country pioneers still marched in time through their earnest hard fought blood.) These all were the ones who came before the story of Indian Joseph and his painted warbonnet of many colors. Emmaline, Anais, Jean Louis and whoever it was that claimed Devil's Disciple Benito as his son.(Benito was always disinclined to share particulars of his forebears with Anais and the children. No one understood exactly why. Perhaps there were secrets too dark to tell in this man’s past. It didn’t seem to matter at the time. Rage is rage and cruel is cruel as mean is mean
.
Meanwhile the World goes on much the same as ever. Now it’s Indian Joseph’s turn to get a little crazy. He’s starting in the middle of the 8th grade at Neely’s Bend Jr. High School in the quaint mid sixties burgh of Madison Tennessee. It all seems like broken segments of a randomly recollected fever dream in retrospect. Interesting, this might be fun.
Walking into his first day at a new school. Going from midstate New York to midstate Tennessee is a bit like time travel or stepping through a mystic wormhole from one universe into another. There are mirrors everywhere. The irony is how in the world do you see yourself?
For one thing his hair is too long for this sixties midsouthern environment, at least from the principal Goshen’s point of view. Also the big Iron Cross on a choke collar chain he wears around his neck, a piece of personal expression he traded a comic book to a kid for back in Millport world raises a few one dimensional eyebrows in the ‘new’ school.
Later the Boho art teacher Ms. Inkwell, who has taken a fancy to our young Native tells Joseph that the principal had called a teachers staff meeting about this possible problem student.
Goshen: This kid from New York looks like trouble. I think he may have been in a gang with long hair and all. He wears that Iron Cross necklace with the big silver dog chain. I should have him searched to see if he’s carrying a weapon, a switchblade or brass knuckles. This is a threat to the safety of our school.
Inkwell: He’s probably just trying to express individuality. The boy’s only 13 years old.
Goshen: Something’s off about that kid. He just doesn’t seem to fit in with the rest of our children. I am concerned with everyones' safety.
Inkwell rolls her mascaraed eyes and lets out a quiet laugh under her breath.
(Note: In every present moment every past moment is also contained as a metaphor, like the parts of an atom. It’s a matter of composition and scale. Sci-fi stuff.
[1]
The Nucleus
Core center: The dense middle part of the atom.
Mass holder: Contains over 99.9% of the atom's total mass.
Composition: Made of protons and neutrons packed tightly together. [Past.Present]
Protons
Location: Found inside the nucleus.
Charge: Carry a positive (+) electrical charge.
Identity: The number of protons decides what chemical element the atom is (for example, one proton makes hydrogen). [Present.Past]
Neutrons
Location: Found inside the nucleus alongside protons.
Charge: Carry no electrical charge (they are neutral).
Weight: Have nearly the same mass as a proton, helping to stabilize the nucleus. [Future]
Electrons
Location: Spin around the nucleus in outer regions called shells or an electron cloud.
Charge: Carry a negative (-) electrical charge.
Size: Are extremely tiny and light, weighing about 1/1,840 of a proton[Memory]
Indian Joseph is a teenage Atom now. A particle of semiotic mass consciousness.
All the time in the world ahead. Too many chemical chain reactions dominate the adolescent phase in a molecular present.
Kind of quarky for just the 8th grade and all, but youth feels too impetuous to be denied itself over a few random time factors.
Ah yes Time? Time to show Neely’s Bend Jr. High, a wild young Indian Joseph playing warpath atomic relative scales.
Poetry by Chaucer Whethers
Read 79 times
Written on 2026-09-24 at 19:43
Save as a bookmark (requires login) Write a comment (requires login) Send as email (requires login) Print text| Texts |
by Chaucer
Whethers Latest textsLap Of The Milky WayParima An Imponderable Conundrum Forever, Once Windslip My favoritesRumblingYou Long Legged Lady Masterpiece |
Increase font
Decrease