IRON  BU DDHA

1.

Some of us have done major pain; Smitty has been told that he is one of these. He knows the litany: kidney stones, gall stones, pancreatitis: the nurse said, "your blood pressure is one-seventy-five over one ten, sir; why didn't you tell us you were in so much pain?" In reproach, as though he had been a child in need of chiding for having broken porcelain. He barely remembers that pain now, but he remembers the nurse. How sad she was for the waste he had made of her skills!

   He goes walking with a friend who says, "I hate war." Straight out, and with no particular war at hand to bring that on; to him it sounds almost trite, but he knows her, knows her daily and hourly sincerities. She had seen a man with one arm, and little enough of that one, ending in silver claws. This man was dressed smartly for sport, was dancing at a soccer ball for his delighted daughter. 

   "War," Smitty says, "is no better or worse than anything else." 

   "But it kills people!" She gets that insistent look. "Or, well, the killed are all right, I mean all right now, but the maimed..." 

   "Oh, him, he looks happy enough." I think she's a bit shocked,  Smitty. But you're going to stand by it; you've had a rough day.

   Years ago, Smitty was working in the woods, a trail job up the McKenzie River out of Eugene, Oregon. The crew was three days away from default, trying to do the work of ten with four guys. Smitty was cutting a four-foot diameter fir log that was lying along the slope, doing the downside cuts, the outward-angled ones that let the round drop out. But hidden under the bark was a split, and half the round jumped at him, too wide to outrun on the sidehill and too heavy to argue with. His forearm was pinned between the log and the muffler of a chainsaw that had been running two hours solid. But he tied up the mess in a bandana and finished out the cuts before calling it a day.

   The next morning, he worked again, and a miserable vine-maple tree sprung out from under a cut log and whacked him right over the bandana. The charred section of arm muscle fell off, with the bandage, and he looked down at it, kind of bemused, and said to no one in particular (the others, scattered over the slope, had troubles of their own): "There oughta be a limit to this kind of thing." But he knew then, and many of us know, there's no such limit. You go from here to there (wherever there is) in pretty much a straight line, and some of it is grim and some of it is not.

   Now as to iron Buddhas: Smitty's daughter's friend has one, he doesn't know how it has got in his head like it has, but there you are. He could lie here listening to Mozart adagios till the sun comes up, but there's that Buddha, stuck to his possessive mind just like all the things Buddhists tell us to leave alone. He's a pretty good Buddha, almost two feet high, with his nose down in the sandbox, not thinking of a thing at all, which makes him a superb Buddha, no way around that.

   There's some rust down his left side, which is the rain side, or maybe somebody rolled him over on their way into the house. If they leave him there long enough, he'll grow some algae, maybe even moss, and appreciate in value to some art collector type, such as Smitty is hankering to be right now, not having sense enough to go read a good poem or have a cup of tea, whatever.

   "Junk man, what do you need me for?" he might ask. "I've got this seam starts here by my right buttock, goes up my right arm, through my right ear, over my head and down into everything on the left, rust and all; you can see they made me in a hurry for a buck. 

   "And here you are, almost picked me up and stashed me in your truck bed, all set to look innocent  when that kid wants to know where the hell his Buddha went to that he hasn't looked at in two years, uh-huh. Don't you remember about Monkey, how he told me he could jump across the universe and back; he did, too,  and pissed on one of the five pillars at the very edge of everything, and how when he got back he was still in my hand, and me with a wet finger?"

***

   When Smitty left Georgia for Oregon in 1975, he built a Conestoga wagon deal on the back of his pickup truck. A round white camper shell, with "Oregon or Bust" in black lettering on the back. 

   He's halfway across the pines of Alabama when a U-Haul truck passes him doing what seems like about eighty miles an hour. State trooper right behind it. Trooper, blue lights bawling, peels out to get around in front of the truck, and the trucker whips left, kicks the patrol car into the median. Car fishtails all over the deep South for a moment or two, then settles in for the chase, whooping. Out of sight they run. Then, one-two-three troopers and one-two county mounties, zoop-zoop-zoop, zoop-zoop and over the horizon. Get 'em, fellas!

   But what Smitty had seen as the truck went by was a guy grinning at him and his little prairie schooner. Having a good time. Bless you, brother. Bless you.

2.

Smitty stops at the flower lady's cart to see if she has roses. There are a few, with struggling leaves, but the blooms are decent still, especially those in pink. She interrupts her desultory lunch, brushing crumbs from her sleeve, to slip a long-stemmed pink from among the buds, carries it to her work table, and deftly wraps the stalk in a yellow paper, tying it, gentle-fingered, with a thin red ribbon.

   He's all of fifty now, this old hippie, brown hair thinning out, face narrowing to a pointed ski nose, got one of those easy-white-man faces that seems to burn easy in a wealth of summer sun, but it fades back into a nice tan in a few days, never peels. His mouth is what you notice, not wide, but full-lipped, mobile, a woman's mouth. The ladies pay attention when he talks, and several have remarked to him that he could have been a woman, an appraisal that thrills him. And he has narrow shoulders, feminine arms, but his walk has a man's rhythm. He looks much like he did at twenty-five, except for the beard, which was black then but is greying fast now.

   He watches the flower lady. She's one of those mouse-brown types, brown hair, brown eyes, brown shirt, collar up to keep back the mean breeze coming down the long street. She has dwelt upon disappointments. As he turns away, he sees in his mind's eye, himself turning back to buy for her one of her own roses. He catches her looking at him warily, as if to say: is there some problem with the rose? No. Yes. No. His history divides again, at that moment, as it often has, traveling the fate that follows some kindness thought of, yet not acted upon.

***

   Rolling toward Oregon, Rocinante, a yellow Chevy pickup truck with its prairie-schooner camper, takes the wide wastes of Texas in stride with three pilgrims in her cab. Smitty's passengers, who are buying the gas, are a young-old lady with new-age self-assurance, freckles and hoop earrings, with a brand-new husband, a Guatemalan she has met on a commune south of the border. They're hitching to Seattle so that Miguel, who knows almost no English and has never traveled, can meet his his in-laws. Hoops teaches language and culture classes in the cab day and night, as freeway America rolls by underneath the wheels, concrete ribbon, gas stations, concrete ribbon. Smitty enjoys the lectures at first, and so does Miguel, but by Arizona, they're both schooled out, and each begins to examine with morose attention the road-killed recaps and armadillos passing by. 

   "Now, Miguel. This is a backpack, b-a-c-k-p-a-c-k, also called a ruck sack, it's not what backpackers call a backpack, 'cuz it hasn't got a frame. This is a zipper, z-i-p-p-e-r, like you have there on your jeans, and in here is a pocket, like a jeans pocket."

   "Pants pocket," says Smitty. 

   "Excuse me?" goes the lady. 

   "Pants pocket. What you have in jeans isn't called a jeans pocket, it's a pants pocket." 

   "Never heard of such a thing," she says. 

   Miguel asks her something in Spanish, she rattles off something back at him, they go on a while like that, but faster. Then Miguel summons immense dignity, jams his hands in his -- jeans pockets, pants pockets, whatever -- and enunciates, slowly and emphatically: "You know ... always ... everything." A tear forms in the corner of his eye, and he turns away to regard the sunset on the passing, wasted hills.

   It's January. Rocinante pulls up onto a bit of unfenced desert. The pilgrims gather dry mesquite branches, and sit around a fire, close, under a wheel of stars turning earth-slow, brilliant as only desert stars can be when the night plans to drop to zero.

   Smitty tells about Georgia nights. Hoop-ears translates for Miguel from time to time.

   "My great-great grandfather, the one who married a Cherokee lady, raised cotton on top of Dugdown Mountain. Everything he did is gone now -- it's all red oaks, a hundred years' worth. The road along the ridge was through country without a single house, so it could get dark, I mean really dark. My mama told me this story.

   "Grandpa was coming home on the buggy, coming along with a lantern, he was just in this pool of yellow light, oh about twenty foot across. And the horse, which was a good horse, not one you would think of to get scared a lot, just pulled up short and wouldn't get, wouldn't gee nor haw. So Grandpa, who was real tired and not thinking to stay out all night, gets down to go around front and talk sense into the horse, when right then the horse up and hauls off the buggy toward home and Grandpa is in the road in pitch black.

   "Well, he can see just one thing and that's the light in the window of his house, across the cotton fields way around the ridge. It's two miles by the road and about a mile straight down and up through the fields. He's standing there thinking what in the hell has got into that horse and then he thinks maybe he hears something. Or, no, he thinks maybe he feels something, like there's eyes looking at his back. He turns, and he doesn't see nothin' but he feels like the front of his face sees something, you know what I mean? Like there's a kind of living headlights out there, and he's caught in the beam, and he is food.

   "So Grandpa, he starts running down the road, and he sorta hears something soft and heavy trotting in the dust of the wagon ruts behind him. So he throws off his hat to give that thing something to sniff at and jumps down into the cotton field and cuts across the rows toward that light in his kitchen window. Well, something thumps and swishes into the cotton behind him, and so he throws off his shirt and runs on down by the pond. He's running about as hard as he can go, goes by the pond, and through the willows, and right behind him something's rustling willow twigs. So he quick somehow shucks his pants and runs in nothing but his shoes up through the cotton on the other side of the draw to where he's about at the end of the farm yard. 

   "He can see Grandma is working at the table by the window, rolling dough with her big arms, and hollers: "MA, OPEN THAT DOOR!" She runs over and pops the door with her floury hand and he comes through on the jump, slams it behind him and WHAP!! something hits that door so hard it bends the hinges.

   "Next day they saw where there was deep scratches all over that door, had to plane it down like it was new-sawn. The tracks they found in the farm yard was cougar tracks. He said he could put both his fists side by side like this" -- Smitty demonstrates -- "and stick them down in a track with room to spare."

   Miguel likes the story. Hoop-ears does too. Looks like they have made up. She snuggles down deep in her sleeping bag, tucked under his arm, and Miguel gets out a long wooden flute. He plays, something startlingly complex, something Central American and lovely, entirely suited to night in a wild place. If there were any breeze he couldn't do it; the night is the coldest one each of them has known. But the air is still as a black sea of glass, and his notes rise like owls to the mountainside close by.

3.

   Smitty works in a government office these days, in the Belly of the Beast, and at lunch walks out to a nearby cemetery to hang about beneath the dark firs, glowering, trying to remember something of his poetry. He's enroute when waylaid by an old black man in dreadlocks.

   "Uh, hey! Can I TALK to you a minute, buddy?" The old-timer's face splits in a grin that shows one tooth gold among those remaining.

   Smitty's good at avoiding people, can spot leaflet do-gooders a block away and panhandlers from two blocks, navigating the streets in a solitude born of years spent stalking animals to see what they're up to. He's shocked that this old man has come up on him out of nowhere, like, and, curious as to the skill of the enemy, as it were, assents.

   "Yeah, I gotta talk to you. You come out of that building there like you thought you was GOIN somewhere, but you ain't been goin NOWHERE. Have I got your full attention, SIR?" He's not grinning now. 

   Smitty's fairly shook but decides to take it like a man, after all he was raised to have a respect for prophets. His father once told him a story of having spooked an entire tent-meeting with a bedsheet and having been nearly killed in the ensuing bedlam, and he hadn't smiled while telling that story. He had changed his ways, and Smitty himself, as a child, had been to tent-meetings, in clean clothes too. If the old man is softening him up for money, he just might have found Smitty's weak spot.

   "Lemme tell ya -- I see ya walkin aroun here, you ain't drinkin enough WATER, you gotta get some ELECTROLYTE in you, you don't have enough RESPECK for y'self."

   This doesn't sound like a handout speech to Smitty. He starts listening, his breath coming quietly.

   "You are an OLD SOUL, you hadda lot of LIFETIMES, this is your LAST one, and you had better get it TOGETHER. You got things to do, and you been HIDIN y'self, you got me?" The old-timer grabs Smitty's lapel, gently enough but urgently, and leans into him for total eye contact. "You got things to DO. Now I'm gonna go this way an you're gonna go that way, an I don't wanna SEE you lookin down at the GROUN like you been WHIPPED, are you gonna get STARTED now cuz you got a whole lotta people DEPENDIN on you to get through to y'self, you GOT me?" And lets go, like that, and walks away.

   This whole time there are sidewalk bodies going by, nobody stops to bystand and act worried, and nobody looks like they're pretending to not notice -- it's like the old man is not even there. And Smitty never sees him again, either. Angel stuff? Nahhhh...Smitty works hard at his rationalism. True about the water, though. A week later they take him in at the hospital to blast apart yet another kidney stone with ultrasound.

   Smitty thinks about telling the Iron Buddha about the old man. But the Buddha already knows, neh? Always. That's why he's smiling, lying there on his side in the rain. So Smitty tells his friends the story. One by one, all the details. And they all look at him like they've already heard it, and like, so has he followed the advice yet about  the water?

***

   Rocinante carries him and his passengers into Los Angeles, and Smitty's not happy with the place. He's staying at some ashram full of people in turbans, which is cool, but the streets outside are unremittingly mean, full of men in long black coats and black glasses that walk into places and everybody gets quiet. He goes out to the curb to see if Rocinante is still there or has she got her tires slashed or anything, and there's goo all over the windshields. 

   "What IS this stuff?" he asks, sliming his thumb. 

   "That's smog," says one of the turbans. 

   I'm gone from here, thinks Smitty, and says goodbye to his cross-country passengers. He goes about ten blocks toward Oregon, but something keeps catching his attention.

   There are all these little shops, with signs on them like House of Oral Love, in neon. Each has a storefront window with one or two bored-looking women in it; they're waving to him as he drives (slowly) by -- no, beckoning. Business must be painfully slow. He pulls over to the curb. Two of the ladies lean out of a doorway, framed in high-gloss enamel. They don't look particularly prostitutish to him, but then he's never met one. Sheltered life, Mr. Deep South, really sheltered. One lady has a kind of Sixties page-boy hairdo, a string of fake pearls and those pointy-framed black glasses that women wear in sitcoms when you're not supposed to think they're pretty. But she is. The other has long, long hair and a fresh face, someone who gets enough sleep. He can see the book she's been reading, upended on the broken-backed chair behind her. It's a college sociology textbook, for crying out loud. So, is she doing her research here? Or, yeah, just earning tuition? Work-study, hah. If he were less shy he'd like to sit and talk with them awhile, learn something about them, and about stereotyping, which he realizes he's been doing as ignorance. These are people. Just like anybody.

   But their patter isn't encouraging this discovery. They're on the job. "Come on in, come on in, have some fun, fella." 

   "Well, "says Smitty, "I would but, ah, I don't have a whole lot of cash." He has enough for gas to get him to Oregon, a few groceries, he's not going to spend it here. That's o.k., they assure him, things are REAL slow, what have you got? 

   "Uh, a few nickels, dime, three pennies." 

   This gives them the giggles; they can see he still thinks himself a virtuous lad, but doesn't want to offend. Such a nice boy! Aw, too bad, see ya around! Bye-BYEE! They're still waving, really waving this time, as he turns over Rocinante's engine and drives north, a little faster now, along the boulevard.

   In an hour he rounds a bend, pulls off the pavement between two guardrails, bumps along to a stop on a high cliff, and steps out of the truck's cab to hear the waves collapsing among the rocks of the California coast. He's experiencing his first sunset on the Pacific Ocean, and the smell of the strange nameless wind-sculpted vegetation all around brings him for the first time some awareness of just how far he is from Warren County, Georgia, or pretty much anywhere he's ever been. 

   On the beach below, small energetic birds are running, running, matched by their reflections on the wet beach, running down to the restless water, running back with it as boils up the darkening strand. He's only seen them in books. Suddenly he wishes he could share this view with the two women from the Los Angeles brothel. Would they know that these tears now forming in his eyes were not for the beauty of the ocean alone, but for theirs as well?

***

   The Iron Buddha likes this romanticized version of Smitty's remembering, but he has questions. "Suppose you had had enough money to go in and make that business transaction. Would you have done so?"

   "Oh, probably, probably so. But, y'see," says Smitty, "these ladies had a something" -- 

   "Innocence?" smiles the Buddha -- 

   "Sure, whatever, anyway I'm thinking there is more to this stuff than they told me about in church, and even more to it than they told me later in the Left, about exploitation and women's rights and sin and blah blah blah. Dunno how to put it. Felt like I passed up a chance to learn something there."

   "But," says the Buddha, "you weighed risks, then drove away." 

   "Yeah," agrees Smitty. "It wasn't about not sinning, and it wasn't about not exploiting. I was being a coward about something life was trying to show me."

   Smitty waits for the Buddha's comment on this, but, as the story goes in the old South, the Tar Baby he sot there and sot there and he don't say nuffin at all.

4.

   You don't mess with promises you have made to those who have died young.

   There was a woman, you'll meet her later if you will, who stood looking out across the Cascade Range from a high place, hugging herself with her arms, windblown brown hair going straight back behind her, a knee-length gingham skirt blowing back too. Turned her hazel eyes on Smitty and said, "you have to tell all this someday. Don't let the silence get it. Don't let the silence get all of us; we all worked so hard and what we were could have changed the world. You'll tell it, o.k.?"

   She gave him that no-nonsense look. "It matters," she said.

   "Yes, love, I will," he said. 

   Rocinante noses up the coast, stopping for a wine-tasting here and a view there, and hits the rains of Oregon in the middle of a socked-in, moonless night. Smitty nearly plows into a cliff on a mountain curve, which wakes him enough to find his turn-off, a right into a valley that has in it the smallest post office in Oregon, not much bigger than an outhouse, and about sixty houses, all scattered along about fourteen miles of noisy creek. The road turns to gravel, the cut-banks, full of bedraggled last year's foxgloves, lean in to kiss the cab windows, and the dark turns almighty. Smitty realizes he's passed the last house and must have missed the commune he's heading for, so he begins a k-turn on the road, jockeys back and forth about four times, and sinks his rear wheels in the ditch. Ah, well. Whaddya expect?

   Can't just go to bed and deal with it in the ay em, we're athwart the road and a sign back there did say "Caution: Log Trucks" -- so this thing has gotta reroute before dawn. Smitty digs out a flashlight and rain jacket, hikes back to where he saw the last window with light in it. He gets his first whiff of wet Douglas fir, along with other smells he can't identify yet: western hemlock, western red cedar, red alder, bigleaf maple, sword fern, bracken, thimbleberry, and salal. He looks up into the canopy closing in far overhead of trees over a hundred and fifty feet tall, and on impulse switches off the light to let the rain fall on his face in silence, in darkness. Delicious. Especially after Texas and its paving of raw armadillo.

   The house he comes to is covered, roof and walls, with cedar shakes and sticks itself out at the woods in odd angles all over, as if it had been built by someone looking over his shoulder. Raw red-alder smoke, full of half-digested creosote soot, pours out the chimney and drifts down to the creek across the road. He knocks. He hears activity.

   "Whoa, hang on, somebody's out there."

   "Yeah, I bet they're in a ditch halfway to Six Rivers."

   The door opens, and Smitty looks up into the face of a tall man, six-four or better, with long hair and a full beard and deep-set preacher's eyes. 

   "Hi, I'm Smitty, I'm looking for the commune." 

   "Which one? This here's a commune, friend." 

   "Uh, Omega Farm, friend of mine lives there, guy named Dan." 

  "Oh, yeah, that's four miles down, you missed it. Four miles on the left." Big Guy waits, hoping to close the door.

   "Um, left my truck up the Forest Service road, it's uh, stuck, I'd leave it but...."

   "Yeah, we'll help you out, actually we do that a lot, come on in."

   Smitty enters the light of a kerosene lamp, which seems to him bright after the mountain blackness. He knows lamps, and appreciates at once the skills of his hosts: no coloring dyes in the fuel, a clean chimney, trimmed wick. Real light, steady, easy on the eyes. At once he takes in the interior scheme that he will see in all the homes of his friends for the next ten years: cedar paneling, a leaky skylight, spider plant in a rope-macrame-hung planter to catch the drips from the skylight, shelves loaded with little brass incense burners and copies of Ram Dass's Be Here Now. An embossed iron stove sits on a brick pad in the midst, surrounded by six people and a yellow lab (not barking at the intruder - a good sign). Three small women, with the long straight hair, no makeup, long dresses, small noses and freckles of hippiedom, such as Smitty had known in Georgia in the Sixties, and three large men, patriarchs in beards and suspenders, with ruddy cheeks and rough hands, look back at him from deep within smoky-looking overstuffed chairs. Nice folks all, really -- but Smitty feels he has interrupted something serious.

   The man who has answered the door takes it on: "We, ah, we're White Star, oldest commune in the valley, but, uh, we're breaking up. Yeah. Hmm, couldn't agree on how to divvy up, so, uh, we're going to have a COIN TOSS."

   One of the young ladies looks up soulfully, tossing her blonde mane, and shows Smitty a Walking Liberty silver dollar. "Me and Jeffrey -- " she nods at the giant who spoke before her -- have called heads, and the others here have called tails, and title to the whole place will go to the winners." Heads nod.

   "We'll do that after I help Mr. Smitty here," says Jeffrey. "Lemme get my rain gear." Jeffrey clumps out to the mudroom. 

   Smitty stands steaming before the solemn contestants, wondering what to say on such an occasion.

   The lady tosses her mane again, and wrinkles her freckled nose at him. "Where abouts did you come in from?" 

   "Georgia." Smitty steps gingerly across to the stove, leaving little puddles as he goes, and spreads his hands to its warmth.

  "Oh, you're a friend of Davy's. Yeah. He's really nice, hard worker and smart too...how come you gave up on Georgia?"

   "Uh, well, I got married three times and divorced three times and felt like I kinda wore out my welcome, thought I'd see what it's like out here." 

   "I know what you mean, nobody is from here, I'm from New Jersey really. Too many cemeteries."

   Yeah, that makes sense to Smitty. All over Atlanta, all over the great snorting East, cemeteries, including the one with the big lion sleeping over the mass grave of Confederate dead, with the huge smokestacks of  Cabbage Town's cotton mill for a backdrop. Generations sitting on top of each other, each doing things their daddy has  done, breathing used air, already know everybody they want to know, burying one another in long rows, right up to the stone walls along the sidewalks, with dilapidated gas stations across the street, hollow-eyed men leaning on pumps in the shade of a tin roof, sucking at half-cold Nehi drinks, too hot, too  tired to curse a fate they 're only dimly aware of, OUTTA THERE Smitty, Rocinante can go a pretty good ways in a straight line on a fill-up, look for a place to breathe. No wonder you turned up your face to the rain among those ancient fir trees. Even this room, with its friendly woodstove, seems too civilized for you right now.

   Jeffrey comes through, a heavy-duty tow chain draped over both shoulders. "O.k., let's go," he says.

5

   After a long summer spent musing over mortality (in hospital waiting rooms, watching over the trials of the flesh visited upon his aging parents), Smitty walks down to the Big River and plants his feet in the soft mud beneath a mother-of-god huge cottonwood. There are a couple of ospreys here, fluttering like hummingbirds fifty feet above the water, then plunging with an audible whack into the shallows for fish. They come up empty on most tries, just as Smitty has so often done. Just because you have better than 20-20 vision, super-sharp talons, and a huge ready-for-business beak, doesn't mean you win every time out, or even very often...hmmm. But the good news is, the ospreys are here, meaning they got through the last winter, meaning there's fish out there, meaning that some fish made the ultimate sacrifice even in the dark of winter, when the water was high, fast, and ugly. So maybe life is worth living?

  The Iron Buddha doesn't comment on this one. Smitty briefly imagines him, cleaned up, tucked into the playhouse-cum-zendo out behind the blackberries, sitting oh-so-serenely on the cable-spool table with a bit of sandalwood burning under his nose. You can go through exercises, setting up stuff like that, or not, doesn't seem to matter. Watching ospreys, on the other hand, seems like it has a payoff every time.

    "You're getting the hang of it," says the Buddha.

    Say what?

***

    Omega Farm turns out to be a collection of some twenty-odd hippies of the anarcho-Catholic Worker type that dates back to the Abraham Lincoln Brigade. The men all look like Gurdjieff and the center of attention is a larger-than life woman, called the Duchess when she's out of earshot, who sort of resembles Madame Blavatsky in burgundy sweaters. Smitty likes the setting: big white-and-brown farmhouse, retired dairy farm amidst densely forested hills, smell of damp alder-wood smoke drifting through the omnipresent Douglas firs. The meals are good: vegetarian fare, homemade bread, homemade tofu, fresh eggs, real cream. He half entertains the idea of joining the commune, but there's a commotion in the entryway. A new member has taken a notion to sweep the area, out of the goodness of her long-haired, willowy heart, and she's immediately surrounded by three or four of the regulars.

    "No, no, you mustn't sweep the mudroom!"

    "Why not? I feel like it..." Lower lip trembles.

    "You're not the one scheduled to do it," says the first one.

   "We each have our responsibilities, we had meetings, we gotta do it like we said in the meetings,"  adds the second one. 

   "There's a list. If it says on the list, sweep the mudroom, and your name is on it, you sweep the mudroom." This third one is tall and warrior like, and says it with arms crossed.

    The joy goes out of her face right there, and she slumps and surrenders the broom. Smitty is already planning his getaway by the time the second one opens her mouth.

    He catches up to his old Georgia buddy, Dan, out pulling up yellow flowers in the pasture.

    "Uh, Dan."

    "Yo, Buddy."

    Dan, lanky, sandy-bearded, always wearing a cowboy Stetson and always smiling, is quite a few years younger than Smitty but has already seen much more of the world, and, having seen it, has settled in as the farm's gardener the way medieval types used to join the monastery. His advice, on just about anything, is always good.

    "Dan, I got to pull up stakes here and go to work somewheres."

    "Tree planting."

    "Um?"

    "Yep. Pull up some of these with me. Bend your knees, lock your arms, then straighten your legs. They'll come right out."

    The flowers are pretty, but Smitty notices he doesn't like he smell of his hands after pulling one. "What are they?"

    "Tansy ragwort. Makes the cow's milk bad, and if she eats enough of it, she dies."

   Smitty starts pulling. "Tree planting?"

   "Yeah. I did that when I was first out here."

   Dan begins weaving tales: how, when he first reached Oregon, needing work, he discovered a cooperative, full of earnest hippies, that made bids on government reforestation contracts and moved, en masse, to the work sites to live in tents, buses, yurts, and pickup campers, sitting around campfires at night singing, then working like demons the next day. How the work is done, the terminology, the small-scale economics, a cross between migrant work and tribalism. How his crew took over an abandoned one-room schoolhouse and lived in it all winter, chopping wood, carrying water.

   The Iron Buddha knows that one. "Hey, Smitty..."

   Yes, the nun. She had worked so hard, carrying the water even at night, the steps were uneven and mossy, but she was determined not to spill even a drop, as her sign of mindfulness. And the bucket had simply, from old age, sprung apart and dumped the water everywhere in the moonlight. Big kenshu! So she wrote a poem: "...No more moon in the water. No more moon in the pail!"

   I bet there's a connection here somewhere, thinks Smitty, but the Buddha has let him tell the story to himself; smart Buddha.

   Chopping wood, carrying water.

   "So, uh, Dan, how do the camp chores get divvied up?" 

   "Pile up the tansies; if you leave 'em all over the ground like that, they get any wet weather, they'll re-root. Oh pretty much like in any family, y'know, them that are into it do it, and if they get tired of it, they stop, then if everybody else get's cold they'll get the hint and go pick up an ax, whatever."

   "Sounds good. Where can I join?"

   "Um, well, Lemmee see." Dan straightens up, puts his hands on his lower back, and swivels. "There are different crews in the co-op, about ten of 'em, and what you do is join a crew. I was in the Red Stars; most of the people around here that are in this thing are on the Thumb crew. I'll see if I can find out if there's a crew meeting any time soon."

   "Thumb?"

   "I dunno, that's what they called it. How about you pick up that pile over there, and I'll pick up this one, and we'll dump it all outside the pasture fence." 

To be continued