|
Medicine Bag
by Greg Leichner Another grueling project has come to an end. It has taken me fifteen visits over fifteen years to resurrect this 1919 craftsman home room by room. Final touch: my brother's one-car garage is now an office, a hideaway with a built-in desk and storage cabinets, bookshelves, couch, coffee table, TV, DVD and sleeping loft. My brother's wife, always in need of quiet time thanks to two teenagers, has claimed the garage as her own. She is calling it her menstrual hut. I have spent five months in Seattle with my nose to the grindstone. At one point I worked thirty days in a row. On the last day of June I drove I-90 from Seattle to the July 4th gathering of old friends on Flathead Lake in Montana. I didn't mind the rain. An overcast sky is easy on the eyes. I plugged in a book-on-tape and for five hundred miles it was Rex Stout's "The Final Deduction," wherein Nero Wolfe thinks his way to the truth behind a high society kidnap/murder. In Stateline, Idaho, I exited the Texaco mini-mart sipping my coffee. I passed a man in his late sixties, we made eye contact and nodded good morning. At the truck I turned and the man was walking toward me. He said, "Aren't you the one who installed my kitchen faucet? At the cabin on Newman Lake. Last month." "Did he drive a brown pickup?" "Yep. You look just like him." "A problem with the faucet?" "Nope. You did a good job." My doppelganger lives in Idaho. * I am a loner carpenter, a vagabond, an animist. I keep my religion in a medicine bag stashed behind the driver's seat of my brown pickup truck. It has been ten years since I last dumped the medicine bag's contents onto the kitchen counter, in front of everybody. :two Zippo lighters (Dad's) :one dry fly (Royal Coachman) :one brass-bead choker (gift from a lover) :two deer vertabrae (Blackfoot River) :two newspaper obituaries: (Uncle Don and Old Man Brown) :one wishbone (grouse) :one small brass bell (inscribed with FLORIDA) :nineteen buffalo nickels :twelve Mercury dimes :guitar pick :tuning fork :shark's toot “I don't question it. I accept every aspect of my medicine bag.” Carefully I placed each aspect back inside the canvas pouch and drew the strings closed. I buried the medicine bag behind the driver's seat, underneath roadmaps, beach towels, a basketball, a baseball glove and a strongbox containing my grandfather's Hamilton pocket watch, a 1907 edition of stories by Edgar Allan Poe, and an invalid passport. * In the glove compartment I keep a copy of the Magnetic Poetry Kit refrigerator poem I composed at the lake in Montana, for my current forbidden love. cool moan beneath the moment our gift is crushed smooth as purple shadow our frantic trudge a delirious storm chained to honey skin Tomorrow I hit the road again, bound for New Mexico via Missoula, Boise, Salt Lake City, Moab, Cortez, Durango. |
