Dixiana's Lament- A Short Story

 It is morning, and the sweet smell of the honeysuckle outside beckons to me as I open my window.  It is like this every spring in this house that I have lived in for the past eighty-four years and one hundred and two days.  The earliest memory I have of this house was in this season too.  The sun was bright and the trees had turned green again from their winter sleep.  I was three, and Momma had thought me old enough to go with my sister Bonnie to the hen-house and get the eggs.  As we get there I notice this rope-thing lying on the ground and I go to put my hand toward it and Bonnie yells and the thing darts from the ground and opens its mouth with a hiss and I see two sharp teeth and I fall over and scream and Momma come a-running from the house with a hoe in her hand and she hit the snake with it and the head flies off, landing at my feet.  I turned my head away from it and sobbed into Momma’s apron as her warm embrace comforted me.  That was the first time I seen a living thing die, and it was so fragile.  One second the snake was snapping at me, the next it was in two pieces, still on the ground.  I wish I had a better first memory, perhaps one to do with the time I was baptized down at Johnson’s Crossroads at the First Presbyterian Church and Momma and Daddy told me all the ladies there cooed all over me and how beautiful a baby I was and I didn’t cry a peep as they poured the water on my head in my snow-white gown.  And afterwards, as the church held the luncheon to celebrate, I clung on to Bonnie and to Aunt Evelyn and Momma got a bit flustered because she thought I was getting too much attention.  At least, that’s what she told me.  But the first thing I remember is the snake.  It’s never gonna leave me, because I saw the end of a life that day.

It was not the first life I watched end, like when I had to kill the rooster when I was 10.  I had fed that rooster from my hand, but it grew time for slaughter, and Daddy thought I was old enough to help.  I held it down as he snapped the poor thing’s neck.  It didn’t struggle at all, because it trusted me to the end and I had betrayed it.  I could never eat chicken after that.  I was there when the men in the green suits and the pointed hats come to our door and tell Momma that Daddy had been killed somewhere far-off like in France and that he ain’t coming back no more and she fell over herself crying and two weeks later his body come and we buried him in the graveyard on the hill surrounded by the live oaks where his daddy was, and his daddy, and even his daddy before him, where the old gray tombstones crumble away, stain brown, and where you can barely read where the words 30^th GEORGIA or BELOVED DAUGHTER are written on them, and the Spanish moss hangs so low that it about near touches the ground but it look like it come all the way from heaven.  When Momma passed, Jeb and me and Aunt Evelyn and Uncle Andrew put her in the same ground right by Daddy so that they could be together with Jesus.  She loved Jeb like he was her own son because I know Momma wanted a boy because she was the only girl in her family and was used to boys, but she only had Bonnie n’ me and none else.  She thought Patrick would be the son that she ain’t never had but then he and Bonnie moved to Atlanta where he was fixing to be some big shot in some bank or something and they only come back once a year to see Momma at Christmastime, but me n’ Jeb stayed to take care of her.  I never did like Patrick anyway because he acted like he was too good for Scarsboro.  He would talk about how he had gone to school at Sewanee and he would take Bonnie somewhere where she could wear pearls and drink from crystal glasses and he didn’t even go to church on Sunday but she bought everything he said.  I just knew he was gonna leave her someday but I couldn’t do nothing about it and the day before they got married Bonnie told me that she loved him and that I wouldn’t never understand because I was jealous of her and to mind my own goddamn business before she hit me.  I cried that night.

It was also spring when I could see the magnolia a-blooming four years ago when I woke up and I found Jeb cold in the bed beside me.  He never wanted to be buried in a Chatwood cemetery because he wasn’t no Chatwood; he was a Richardson and he wanted to be buried in the forests where he would go hunting, right by where we buried Red, and Joe, and later Tucker who he would take with him on Saturday mornings and they would stand arrow straight with their noses out and their front legs up where the quail were hiding in the brush and then he would shoot ‘em when they flew out and they would fall down to the ground and later he would gut them and clean them and I would brush them with butter and rub them with spices and cook them and we had many happy dinners that way, Jeb and Cynthia and Beau and me.  I still couldn’t eat the quail because I couldn’t get the image of that chicken out of my head, but everyone else loved them and I was happy to make it for them.  When we buried him the whole church congregation came and Bonnie and Patrick were there but they didn’t say no words to me and they left right afterwards.  Didn’t even stay for lunch.  Beau wasn’t there but it was okay because he was always traveling about for some business thing or another and I knew he would have been there if he could make it and he was still a-thinking ‘bout his daddy wherever in the world he was.  But Cynthia wasn’t there either and I was the saddest about that.  I remember when she was born down in the hospital in Newberryville and the nurses told me she looked just like I did and I was the happiest in the world.  She loved the trees and the flowers that grew in the front yard of the house and before she could even walk she wanted to grab the watering can that Momma had bought for a nickel from the five-and-dime run by Mr. Sexton on Oak Street and pour the fresh water over the tomatoes and the celery and the tulips and everything else I grew in the front yard and later on when she got big enough she picked out her own plants at the store and grew them and she won third prize in the 10-and-under category at the county fair for the strawberries that she grew.  I think we were prouder of her than she was.  We spoiled her; for Christmas she would get all the dolls she wanted, and later the dresses and lipstick, and one year we drove all the way to Atlanta and let her sit in Santa’s lap at Rich’s and that year she got a Talky Tammy doll and Beau got his first baseball bat.  She grew up with Tommy Dalton who lived a quarter-mile down the road and I knew they would be married someday because they got along so well and he always danced with her at Cotillion and we knew the Daltons and it would have been lovely if they ended up as part of our family.  We had scraped and saved to send her to finishing school in Atlanta and then to Emory because Tommy had gone there too and she sent us letters every week and we thought that surely she would announce that he’d proposed but the letters started coming less and less and soon we find the next time that she returns that she brings along with her some Yankee boy who came to Athens from Ohio or Michigan or one of those states where it’s colder’n the Ninth Circle and I tell her straight to her face that she was making a mistake and I only did it because it was best for her because all those damn Yankees had ever done was steal from Forrest County and they shot my great-great-granddaddy at Shiloh and by God they wouldn’t take my daughter from me.  I hated him as soon as I lay eyes on him because I knew when I saw him he was just like Patrick and he would take Cynthia from me just like Patrick had taken Bonnie.  I knew he must have blackmailed her or threatened her or something like that because there was no way my sweet girl could have ever fallen for a rat like that and I told her that but he had blinded her or put a gun to her head or something and she talked back to me and she had never done that before.  I told Jeb to run him out of Newberry County but he just sighed and said to leave her be and I wasn’t gonna change her mind like that.  He was my husband, he had to understand and I cried because even he couldn’t realize it.  The next morning I wake up to find they both left and Cynthia left a note on the table saying that she had come back to tell me that the Yankee had proposed and she was leaving with him to go to where he came from.  I heard Tommy Dalton drank himself to death years ago and they found his body in a river and he didn’t deserve that and neither did Jeb and neither did Beau or I and it was all that damn Yankee’s fault for stealing Cynthia away from me and I’ll never forgive him for as long as I live because she ain’t never come to see me again and it’s probably because he killed her or locked her up in his basement.  I knew he was no good and I just know the good Lord will send him to burn in hell if there is any justice in this world.

It used to be that this house stood alone on this road, first you would pass by the Daltons’ and then go a ways down Briar Creek road and come to this house, and then past that it was a straight shot to Johnson’s Crossroads and the church.  But it seems like this place has grown up in the last few years because now I have all sorts of neighbors and I see them passing by all the time and I wave to them and chat with them.  Now that I’m the only Richardson in this house it’s good to have some company some of the time.  All the women from church and from Cynthia and Beau’s Cotillion passed before me or they grew too frail to leave their houses, but though I am also frail and old thank the Lord I can move and leave my bed.  There’s even a restaurant down the street and it’s close enough to walk and sometimes I even go there and I see my neighbors there frequently.  I chat with them over tea or a biscuit or even a steak sometimes and it’s good food but it’s not close to the type of cooking that Momma would make and I miss it very much.  There are also the maids and the first time I saw them and they came in I was surprised because they were wearing these funny green clothes and I thought they were supposed to wear aprons, but I never been rich enough my whole life to have any maids and Jeb neither so I guess I wouldn’t know what maids wear nowadays.  Beau studied hard and went to Athens and ended up studying law and now he makes so much money working for the government I guess he hired them to help me in my old age and I’m grateful for them because they help me when I’m too tired to leave my bed or when I cough they put this funny thing in my nose and it helps me breathe and when I’m sick they give me medicine.  They even make food in the kitchen for me and bring it, and I keep telling them they don’t have to do none of that and I’ll cook because I been cooking in that kitchen for nigh on seventy years, but I’m afraid my memory is too foggy and I forget where the kitchen is in the house because I ain’t been down there so long and I have to sit down again and let them do it for me.  I’m so grateful that the maids do their job so well.  Beau is always so thoughtful, that boy.  I remember when I first met the maids and I was so pleased that he had sent them and I asked them what they thought of my home and I told them it was sorry it was more shabby than they’d like but my old bones just weren’t up to cleaning anymore, and they all said now Miss Lavinia, this ain’t your home and this is the care home, and I just giggled because I knew Beau had told them to say that, and get this every single one of them maids said that before eventually they stopped and started to talk with me about my home so they was joking.  Beau is such a jokester and he would always make Cynthia so mad when they was kids because she’d find a bug in her sheets or a lizard in her chair and occasionally when he and the Dalton boys were playing in our yard he’d hit her with the football and she’d haul off and sock him and they both got spanked for that, but they were being kids and he’d always have a sense of humor and he was just so pleasant to be around.  Especially since Cynthia left he’s the only one I got.  He ain’t been around for a while because he’s always traveling or somewhere else for his job but I know it’s not his fault and he’ll be back to see me before too long.  Besides, he’s always right here in my heart so I don’t feel lonely.  Once I asked one of the maids when he was next coming to see him and she looked very young and she started to say something about a car accident but one of the older maids pulled her away and when she came back she just done and told me he’d be there very soon.  Beau is a strong boy so I’ve been praying for his health but I knowed he got through whatever problems he had.  He’ll be to see me soon.

Now I love my new neighbors but when I was sitting out the other day I see a couple dark niggers come a-walking down the road, strutting in the way that they do, and they came close to where I was and I yell at them to git because this is Chatwood property and they ain’t stealing my flowers or anything else the maids take such good care of since I can’t no more.  They stop and stick out their heads like chickens because apparently they never been told to git by no white man or something, and I tell them to git before I go get Jeb’s shotgun and they moves away right down that road while they keep looking at me.  I see more and more niggers passing by and it’s way too many for my liking.  The head maid is named Kim and she is this kindly heavyset young woman who speaks in a drawl the likes of which the white trash that lived down in the shacks out east of Scarsboro would, but she is such a nice woman I don’t mind much.  I tell her that the maids ought to do more about the negroes because sure as Sunday they will be back in the night to dig up the flowers and plants, and steal the cows and the horses, and the maids have worked too hard doing all of that since I can’t no more, and oughtn’t they be worried about it?  She just sighs and says that she n’ the others have it under control.  We never had no problem with negroes when Jeb was around because he’d be out there with his gun and you’d have to be stupid even for a darkie to try to rob when there’s a white man with a gun in the front yard.  And there didn’t use to be one single nigger in Scarsboro because they all lived in that part of Newberryville right until that damned John Kennedy and that damned Johnson, traitor that he was, signed that law and then nigh on every business in Scarsboro closed because the darkies showed up to everything and everywhere.  But they all left eventually because we ran ‘em out and they went up north.  To that I say good riddance.  When those niggers were marching down the main street of Newberryville like they had the God-given right to sit at the lunch counter of O.E. Gibson’s, me n’ Jeb were right there and waving the same Battle-Flag that our granddaddies’ granddaddies fought for because it was us that had built every corner of the South and we would be damned if those nappy-headed vermin took it from us.  But just like the Yankees did in 1865, they forced us to take the niggers into everything and Scarsboro ain’t ever been the same no more and now in the last few years it seems like they come back from whichever state they went to.  I turn on the television sometimes and behind the President I see niggers.  There are niggers in the White House, in the Capitol, everywhere.  This country has gone to the devil and in ’68 when I turned in my ballot for George Wallace I warned Jeb that this was gonna happen but he didn’t listen and voted for that Yankee Nixon and now look where we’re at.

Sometimes in the middle of the night I wake up and I feel for Jeb but he ain’t there and I cry out and Kim comes running and holds my hand until I calm down and remember he’s gone and she tells me Miss Lavinia, it’s okay, he’s in a better place now.  The older I get the more and more I forget and one day I’m scared I’ll forget Jeb, and Cynthia, and Beau, and Momma and Daddy, Bonnie, every one of them.  My Bible sits at my bedside and I tell myself trust in the Lord with all my understanding and he will lead my path.  He led Momma and Daddy to him and sooner or later it will be my turn.  Last night I had the most wonderful dream.  It was the night Jeb proposed to me, the night of the senior prom, when we were eighteen and I was the young and cheerful girl who had just been voted the queen and him the king; he was the tall, gangly, freckled quarterback on the football team who had just beat Forrest Central and when he first asked me out he tripped over his words and blushed scarlet and I burst out laughing because I couldn’t fathom how someone who was so popular at school could be so awkward and it was only three months afterwards and I already knew I would be his for the rest of my life.  We were lying down in the tall grass at the side of Byers Creek, as his parents’ Ford grew cold behind us and the sun set and the stars winked into light one by one.  That night he told me he loved me and he gave me the ring that I wore until the day we were married, but in my dream he didn’t say nothing at all.  We just lay there and watched the sky.  I’m sure he’s a-waiting for me in the next life, and some days I want to see him more than anything else.  But if I die then this house will have nobody else to take care of it.  So I keep telling him to wait for a while more, when I’m content with this life, ready to leave my home behind and meet him again.

I have lived in this house eighty-four years and one hundred and two days.  Tomorrow it will be one hundred and three days.  I hope I’ll dream again tonight.

The Science is Settled

 When the ancient Athenian statesman Solon visited the great temples of Egypt, he recounted to the priests there tales of Greek mythology, spanning many years from the Flood of Deucalion all the way to the founding of the city he called home.  To this, the most senior of the priests replied: "All you Greeks are children, there is no such thing as an old Greek", and then proceeded to regale Solon with the tale of the great island of Atlantis, which flourished tens of thousands of years ago before it was sunk into the sea.  So goes the story recounted in Plato's Timaeus; regardless of its accuracy, I think we can all appreciate the point that was trying to be made here.  Solon was a highly learned man for his time, and the Greek civilization is certainly one of the most ancient civilizations in the world.  Yet even a scholar such as Solon could not know everything there was to know about the world.  At the time when Agamemnon led the Greek army over the sea against Troy, and even further before that, when Theseus sailed to Crete to fight the Minotaur, or when Hercules performed his labors, or when Jason sought the Golden Fleece, the pyramids of Egypt had already stood for millennia.  Solon, assured of his knowledge and even attempting to boast by telling the priests of the temple the most ancient thing he can think of, is shocked when the priests respond with history the likes of which he is never heard.  The message is clear: one man cannot know everything, and it is the height of folly to act as though he can.  So why, over 2500 years after Plato wrote his dialogue, are the errors of Solon repeated, especially by those so-called "experts"?

I will confess in the interest of full disclosure that I am what would normally be called a "scientist" in modern culture.  I study chemistry, specifically the synthetic organic field.  At the same time, conducting high-level academic research has helped temper my own arrogance and put everything into perspective.  I think Charles Osgood put it most succinctly: "The more we come to know, the more we realize how little we know. The more we understand, the more clear it is that everything we have learned is nothing compared to what we have yet to learn. Behind each locked door we have managed to open are still more doors and more locks, and so on ad infinitum. So science is not an arrival, but a journey. It is not a fixed body of knowledge or growing shelf of facts and theories, but an infinite series of questions. The most brilliant of scientists have been those who have sought not the right answers to give, but the right questions to ask."  To the ordinary citizen whose knowledge of the physical sciences extends no further than the latest Bill Nye special, it might be shocking just how uncertain the field of scientific research actually is.  Scientists with PhDs from the most prestigious universities in the world, at least in my field, spend their entire lives trying to figure out, to use an example from my field, how certain molecules orient themselves during a reaction and why they do so.  Before I first attended university and got started in research, I was certainly guilty of the sin of Solon, but now I understand further, just like Osgood, how little I know.  It is not without reason that the principles of science are called theories, not facts: you cannot shrink yourself to micro-size, or shrink a camera to that size and watch a chemical reaction occur, any more so than you can position yourself in outer space over the course of 200 years and watch Neptune revolve around the sun.  Our "scientific facts" are, in the purest sense of the word, educated guesses based on the things that we can actually observe.  Many of the most groundbreaking discoveries of the last hundred years come with the side effect of disproving the commonly-accepted knowledge.  Science is not a monolith; instead, it changes with new knowledge.  But that concept seems to be alien in this day and age.

It is most ironic that those people who claim to have outgrown God will proceed to worship Science (tm) like a god itself.  It is even more ironic that those same people possess little to no knowledge about the workings of science.  I have to admit my mother was one of those people.  When I was younger I was diagnosed with all sorts of mental health issues.  She was truly trying to look out for me, but her way of doing that was to read all sorts of books and articles where a smiling, white-coated doctor would recommend the latest fad diet.  Needless to say, it never worked.  More than once, I expressed skepticism about how she could be so credulous, and her response was always the same: confusion and disbelief, sometimes ranging into anger and sadness.  How couldn't I understand, she would say in between tears; didn't I know she was doing the best she could for me?  It was what the experts said!  How could I be so ignorant?  The science is settled, she would repeat.  My mental problems never really got better until I was admitted to the care of an excellent psychiatrist who tailored his treatment to my actual symptoms until I was able to function somewhat normally in society again.  And although my relationship with my mother has always been great, she's never apologized for the years of quackery, and I don't think she ever will, because in her mind she never did anything wrong.  After all, the science was settled.  I wonder if that was the same thing that was said to the men participating in the infamous Tuskegee experiments or the schoolchildren subjected to nuclear radiation in the 1950s?

With the advent of the deadliest viral pandemic in history (one that has an over 99.5% survival rate, but keep that hate fact to yourself unless you want to be publicly crucified), it seems that this whole country has become my mother, in turn repeating the sin of Solon.  The science is settled, chant the hordes as one of their overlords such as the always execrable Anthony Fauci comes on the television screen to tell us that we should not go to concerts, baseball games, restaurants, or do anything fun until the Deadliest Virus Known To Man is eliminated.  Don't mention his remarks at the start of this pandemic about how you don't need to wear masks and the deadliness of the virus is exaggerated.  Because the science is settled.  Hydroxychloroquine is listed as one of the WHO's essential medicines, used to treat malaria, arthritis, and a host of other conditions.  As soon as President Trump endorsed studies showing that it was effective for the treatment of the novel coronavirus, suddenly the medicine became poison to the greater medical community.  Why?  Because Orange Man is bad, and he can never be right.  The science is settled.  After weeks of New York Governor Andrew Cuomo howling about how having more than 3 guests over at holiday dinners would kill everyone and instituting the strictest lockdown measures in the nation, coronavirus deaths in his state continue to rise, in contrast to Florida, one of the most open states.  Surely, you might think, that makes a case for the ineffectiveness of lockdowns?  Not according to our social betters!  Instead, even more pearl-clutching, outrage, and stricter lockdowns ensued in blue states.  In Quebec, police dragged a family from their home for having too many people over on New Year's Day for dinner.  Anybody expressing skepticism over the effectiveness of the lockdowns is publicly named and shamed.  Cities institute hotlines for citizens to snitch on their neighbors for having Grandma over at Christmas.  In some cases, lockdown skepticism gets people fired.  All that's missing from the shame treatment is forcing skeptics to wear a dunce cap and taping signs that read "PEON" to their backs.  Why go to these lengths?  Because the science is settled.  When one uses data to back up claims that go contrary to coronavirus orthodoxy, they are "fact-checked" or outright told the numbers don't matter.  Research from the first 150 patients in Alaska to receive the Pfizer coronavirus vaccine showed that one patient suffered from a severe allergic reaction and had to be hospitalized (for comparison, the severe anaphylactic reaction rate for proven vaccines such as the TDAP is somewhere in the range of 1 in 4 million).  A nurse fainted away live on TV after receiving the same vaccine.  Other reports suggest that the vaccine could lead to male infertility, and a vaccine developed in Australia caused its trial subjects to test false positive for HIV.  Of course, dissent against the vaccines being developed, just by simply stating that they were rushed out and not properly tested for side effects, will not be tolerated, just the same as dissent against the lockdowns will not be tolerated.  It would be remiss to end this section without mentioning the "protests for racial justice" that shook America in the throes of the harshest lockdowns.  After months of hearing that setting one foot outside our houses would kill whole cities, we were suddenly told that it was not only okay but necessary to march in the streets in close proximity to thousands of others in protest of an apparent racism problem.  I'm glad to know that the coronavirus is intelligent enough to not infect Good People.  Just like God passed over the blood-smeared doors of the Israelites, the virus passes over the raised fists of those looting a Target standing in solidarity to end racism.  After all, the science is settled.

"The science is settled".  I wonder if that was the same thing that Svante Arrhenius was told by his superiors at the Swedish National Institute of Technology.  Arrhenius, if you might recall, was about to be fired from his professor position for proposing the completely radical idea that ions might dissociate in water.  One hundred years later, this is common knowledge that high schoolers are taught.  When Heinrich Schliemann set out to discover the legendary city of Troy, he was told that it was obviously a myth and that he was a fool to try such a thing.  The science was settled.  Looking back on his discovery and how he found not just the city of Troy but one that had been rebuilt nine times, it's safe to say that the science was not settled.  It will never be settled no matter how many arrogant cretins continue to act like their word, or the words of whichever high priest of Science (tm) is trending, is the gospel truth and any dissent against them is heresy.  Even in the face of "The Greatest Pandemic in History" and the greatest consequences for disbelief of the gospel truth of Science (tm) in history, your mind and its power to ask questions is something that can never be taken away from you, no matter how hard someone else can try.  So the next time someone like the always lovely spokes-puppet Greta Thunberg comes on the television crying about how the world will end by 2025 if we do not ban airplanes and meat, just roll your eyes and continue to have faith in your own thoughts.  Why?  Because the science is not settled.