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OUR LADY OF SORROWS A Written Creative Work submitted to the faculty of San Francisco State University In partial fulfillment of y ,, the requirements for the Degree Master of Fine Arts In Creative Writing by Teo Carla Spengler San Francisco, California May 2017 Copyright by Teo Carla Spengler 2017 CERTIFICATION OF APPROVAL I certify that I have read Our Lady of Sorrows by Teo Carla Spengler, and that in my opinion this work meets the criteria for approving a thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirement for the degree Master of Fine Art in Creative Writing at San Francisco State University. Michelle Carter, Professor OUR LADY OF SORROWS Teo Carla Spengler San Francisco, California 2017 This is a collection of fiction and nonfiction pieces and poetry. I certify that the Abstract is a correct representation of the content of this written creative work. ____ Chair, Thesis Committee Date 1 ^Something I Want to Document Fact: I hike the contraband trails above Sare at dawn. I am alone. Mine are the only boots on the packed soil, in the beech forest, on the limestone rise. Still, what once was never disappears without a trace. The mountain mist holds the warm, heavy scent of the wild boar that retreated deeper into the Pyrenees last night to outdistance the hunters. And my ears imagine the swift, light footfalls of the Basques escaping from Franco’s Spain under cover of darkness, thieves in the night stealing back their own lives. Then something small and round glints on the footpath in the first rays of the sun: a leaden ball. As I bend to retrieve it, the musket booms of Napoleon’s soldiers echo back from the cliffs of LaRhune. Fact: I did not know my mother when she was young, when she lay in the lawn chair in the black and white photo, smiling, one arm extended toward her sister. Yet I imagine her happier before she became Mrs. L.C. Spengler, before Alaska’s wind-chill penetrated her body, before the minus 70 degree temperatures froze her heart, before my father. Not happy but happier, hope still alive that, just ahead, over the rise, something wonderful waited. In San Francisco, years later, I open my palms to a psychic to find evidence of what I already know and will never know: “she was never happy, your mother, but she was happier earlier than later.” 2 Fact: it makes a certain sense to stay in bed all day every day in Delta Junction Alaska, a living tomb of a town in a violated state. Fact: An aunt I never knew write this to my mother when I was 6 years old: “I am sorry about the slap you received at the hands of Ziggy, but it was the only way to deal with a hysteric woman. Why are you so shocked that Mom doesn’t remember you? I told you she did not know our faces. That is why you came to Perth Amboy, to talk about what was to be done. But you made your own plans at the White Court Motel. You took Mom to the airport without even letting us say goodbye. On your own head be it and the heads of your children.” Fact: I have a sister. We played together on the linoleum floor of my family’s trailer parked on a section of cleared homestead land in the vast, unforgiving wilderness of central Alaska. We started school the same year and road the school bus home in the dark arctic afternoons to try to clean the house so perfectly that my mother would get out of bed.Like all miracles, infrequent and long-awaited. I love my sister and still dream of her. I have not seen her for 20 years. 3 Fact: My mother had a sister. Children of poor Polish immigrants, they grew up bull ed and ashamed in New Jersey and left as young women in search of new identities. My mother flew north to Alaska, her sister joined the WACS. Both of them Americanized their names and married men they were afraid of who drank too much and went by their husbands’ names the rest of their lives. I never heard my mother speak Polish willingly; only on her infrequent visits to her mother’s house in New Jersey, and when gramma developed dementia and came to live with us. My father was not pleased and the arrangement did not last long. On April Fool’s Day in the beginning of a cruel spring, my grandmother packed her bags and walked out into heavy snowfall, heading to Poland. Or so they said. When the men came on horseback and with dogs to search for my grandmother, one of the horses bit my finger as I fed it a sugar cube. They never found a trace of my grandmother or her suitcase. I have seen her in my dreams lying dead in my father’s toolbox behind the garage. My mother, my beloved mother, my mother never recovered from whatever happened that day. I never recovered either. Decades and oceans away from my childhood, living in southern France, I still dream of my mother, sitting on a chair turning her face away as I, on my knees at her feet, beg her to love me. 4 *Delta Junction The town of Delta Junction, Alaska, unrolls along both sides of the Alcan Highway for a few miles, the clump of commerce downtown, the one motel, then the structures dwindle, disappear, yielding the roadside to dwarf forests that run all the way to Canada, thousands of acres of spruces stunted by the solid permafrost just beneath the soil surface, by the vicious winds of winter, by the temperatures so low the very memory of them cracks under pressure like brittle sheets of ice. The Tanana River serves as the northern boundary of the town, a mighty river choked off every autumn by the gods of weather, ice some 43 feet thick stifling the river’s roll and tumble, a gag held on so long you’d think the Tanana would turn blue and suffocate. Men take this as a kind of victory, and place a tripod on the ice surface and a tripline to a time-clock on the shore, and offer money to he whose guess comes closest as to when the river will break its bonds. The eerie, echoing crack something between the extended scream of a woman and the boom of gunshot. The western boundary of the town is the old, deep scar of the Delta River bottoms, the two-mile-wide ditch where the little whip of river thrashed and struggled so in its placement that it scraped away the topsoil of the land surrounding it, leaving only gravel studded with beached, bleached logs. Wolves cross the frozen ice in winter and hunt around the edges of the town, hunt and are hunted for the per-pelt bounty. In 5 summer run-off, the Delta swells its banks and feeds the Tanana, running almost parallel to the jagged, white peaks of the Alaska Range. Delta is the official end of the Alaska-Canada Highway. It is the end of the line, and most of the 1,000 people living here in their trailers with wanagons or pre-fabricated homes or log cabins are refugees, one night’s run ahead of the demons behind; the prejudice or bad marriages or pending criminal charges. Even the long arm of the law gets frostbite here, and some wanted men lived in town for years, playing pool at the Buffalo Lodge, drinking at the Evergreen, openly, without fear or shame. While I lived there, the town had seventeen bars, one grocery store, three churches, one gas station and the school. The town’s grim face bears witness to the magnitude of the prejudice my mother faced in New Jersey; that Delta seemed a welcome escape is powerful evidence of the monster she was escaping. She never spoke of it to my sister and me, nor to my father who embraced her tales of a middle-class childhood for the stature and respectability it gave him. It was this lie that in time poisoned her relationship with her sister, but I get ahead of myself. For now, I simply place my mother in Delta Junction in front of the little wooden structure topped by a cross that was the local Catholic Church. I see her standing there, arms hanging lifelessly from sloped shoulders, head tilted to one side, eyes dark and squinting, lips pursed in a tight line. She was excommunicated of course by marrying my divorced father, and she could not take communion or any of the sacraments, but no 6 matter. It is here that I see her, my mother, waiting without hope for something that never came, in the shadow of the church’s wooden sign: Our Lady of Sorrows. The Burden of Proof 7 *Our Lady of Sorrows My mom thought she would be a writer. And she wrote well. But she never wrote a single story as far as I knew, only lists of things she would write about, on titles of stories to come. I wasn’t bom yet when she wrote the lists. I came upon them after she died. My sister changed my mom’s will the day before she died, so I inherited nothing to speak of from the house, only my personal things from my bedroom. I grabbed a few things on the way out though, a box from the storage shed containing old letters, notebooks too, plus a beaded belt my aunt gave my mom when they were young.