Beulah Land
by Corey Flintoff
The radio said it was going to be another beautiful day in Spartanburg County. Beulah Riley looked out her kitchen window and agreed that it was so. She liked to listen as she finished the breakfast dishes. In national news headlines, plans were announced in Washington for the funeral of the slain president, John F. Kennedy. That was sad and still shocking. Most people Beulah knew didn’t much like Kennedy, but it was appalling that such a thing could happen in the United States of America. In local news, sheriff’s deputies were investigating the killing of a Negro man on Pinesap Road. That was out on the edge of town and Beulah didn’t think any more about it, because the disc jockey began playing “Act Naturally” by Buck Owens. It was the kind of song that would stick in her head all day long. The only way to get rid of it would be to think-sing a Christian song like “I’ll Fly Away.”
Beulah was hanging up the wash rag when her blue jays came skimming along the fence by the driveway. She thought of them as hers, because she put out corn for them in the cold months. The bigger of the two birds landed on the tailgate of her stepson’s scaly old pickup. The jay cocked its head at something in the bed of the truck. It hopped down to investigate, then emerged with a bug in its beak. The second jay made a dive into the truck and popped back up with its own prize. Beulah was sure that bird was a female, as small in relation to her mate as Beulah was beside her husband Jim. The little jay mashed its bug against the tailgate before swallowing it. Lonny, her stepson, had a habit of leaving nasty stuff in the back of his truck. One time, it was a string of bass that he caught but never bothered to gut and clean. Jim had been furious at the waste.
Lonny, who was twenty-three, had gone off with a couple of his low-life friends the previous afternoon. He’d been trouble ever since he got back from Charleston.
“You about ready?” Jim came into the kitchen and put his coffee cup in the sink. He was buttoned into a clean pair of overalls for his day at the monument yard. On the way, he’d drop Beulah at the Pristine Laundry. She handed him the lunch bucket she’d prepared, told the kids not to dally on their way to school, and followed him out to his own pickup, a nearly new Ford. “I heard Lonny come in about three o’clock this morning,” Jim said. “He’d better have a good story. He took the 12-gauge without asking.” Lonny, who was twenty-three, had gone off with a couple of his low-life friends the previous afternoon. He’d been trouble ever since he got back from Charleston. Beulah wished he’d go in the Army or something, anything that might straighten him out. He was a bad influence on her children, Katie, who’d just started high school and Little Jim, who was twelve.
Beulah wasn’t one to carry tales, so she didn’t say anything about the bugs in the back of Lonny’s truck. Jim left her at the Pristine a few minutes early, time enough to sit at the break table and eat the hard-boiled egg she brought from home. For breakfast, she’d had only a glass of buttermilk. She tried to stick to small portions of bland, mostly white foods to ease her dyspepsia. Jim told her the discomfort made her look sour and discontented, and that put people off.
Beulah’s co-workers Mavis and Winnifred were already busy, unloading the hotel linens and towels from the industrial washers. They got the task of handling the soiled bedsheets and whatever nastiness came with them. Beulah held one of the white jobs, as a mangle operator, but that meant she couldn’t start until the first loads came out of the wash. The races mostly got on well at the Pristine. Mr. Hazeltine said it was because everybody knew their place and stayed in it.
Mavis and Winnifred were deaconesses at Mount Zion Baptist, the colored church in Pine Branch, and they called each other “Sister.” Mavis was a lean, dark-skinned woman with corded smile muscles at the corners of her mouth. Winnifred was tall and freckled. She wore black-rimmed eyeglasses like Eleanor Roosevelt, glasses that fogged up when she pulled the steaming sheets from the washer. The two had a Bible verse for every occasion, but they also liked to tease anyone who came in range. Sometimes, when they were feeling saucy, they called Beulah “Missus Sister.”
The door to the loading dock was open, sun rippling across the worn plank floor. Beulah and Mavis had a ritual greeting for fine days like this one. “This is the day which the Lord hath made,” Beulah said. The proper response, from Psalm 118, would be “We will rejoice and be glad in it.” This time though, Mavis only said, “Yes, ma’am. It is.” She and Winnifred looked glumly at Beulah from behind their damp canvas laundry carts, and Beulah remembered the radio headline about the man who was killed on Pinesap Road. That was near their church.
“I was sorry to hear about that man who got shot out your way,” Beulah said.
Mavis rolled the first cart full of clean sheets over to Beulah’s mangle. “Not shot,” she said, “and not a man, either. Barely even a boy.” Her voice, normally high and pretty, came out raw, as if she’d been crying.
“It was Sister Mavis’s nephew,” Winnifred said, “not eighteen years old. He was simple-minded. If they didn’t watch him, he would run out to the road to wave at the cars.”
Winnifred brought up the second cart. They were both wearing the same loose, faded cotton housedresses that all the women wore amid the heat and steam of the laundry. Theirs were floral prints in different shades of pink, making them look like wilted paper dolls. “It was Sister Mavis’s nephew,” Winnifred said, “not eighteen years old. He was simple-minded. If they didn’t watch him, he would run out to the road to wave at the cars.”
“He was hit? By a car?” Beulah asked.
Winnifred leaned close so she could speak softly. “Missus, he was dragged by a car—on the gravel, tied by a rope.”
“Dear Lord! An accident? It must have….”
“No!” Winnifred shook her head so hard that one of her bobby pins sprang loose. “No accident. It was a killing. Just like every other.” She clasped her hand over Mavis’s on the rim of the cart. Beulah knew what she was talking about, but the county hadn’t had that kind of killing since Beulah was a little girl.
“The joy of our heart is ceased.” Mavis recited from Lamentations, her voice quavering. “Our dance is turned into mourning.”
Mr. Hazeltine started his first stroll around the laundry floor, his hands behind his back. He was nearing the big washing machines. They all turned back to their work.
Beulah pulled the first double sheet from the cart, folded it in half and set the crease with a snap like “a muleskinner’s whip,” as Jim would say. She fed the sheet into the rollers of the mangle, stepped on the foot pedal and kept the fabric stretched tight so it wouldn’t wrinkle as it was wrung, pressed, and dried in the machine. The finished product slid out onto a steel folding table on the other side.
She tried to keep from thinking about that boy and the gravel and what it must have done to him. Who could do such a thing? How could his parents ever hope to bury every bit of him? How would anyone clean up that stretch of the road so people wouldn’t drive over his blood and all? God would have to send rain.
It would be comforting to have a simple, unquestioning faith, like it might have been in Gospel times, when you could see His face for yourself.
Beulah often talked with Mavis—more so than with Winnifred, because Winnifred was reserved—but she hadn’t known that Mavis had a nephew. Her sister’s child? Her husband’s nephew? And simple-minded. Even though that was a sorrow, people said it was a gift of God’s love. And Mavis and Winnifred and all of them from Pine Branch were so religious. As Beulah had told Jim, “They’re so full of Jesus they don’t chafe at their places in this world; they mostly just care about the next.” Beulah thought she should be that way too, eyes on her eternal home, because wasn’t that the only important thing? But if you were a wife and a mother, you had to look to your family’s salvation, too. And to raise them up in the fear and admonition of the Lord, you had to be involved in all the things of this world, feeding and clothing and doctors’ bills, and pretty soon you’d be so taken up with the worries and cares that you only thought about that, and in Beulah’s case, at least, the worries went straight to her stomach. It would be comforting to have a simple, unquestioning faith, like it might have been in Gospel times, when you could see His face for yourself.
Her insides bothered her so much that she thought about asking Mr. Hazeltine for permission to go to the toilet, but she managed to hold off until the break.
At lunchtime Beulah ate one of the biscuits with gravy that was left over from her husband’s breakfast. That relieved her discomfort for a while, but it came back worse, so she fizzed a spoonful of baking soda in a glass of water during the afternoon break.
All afternoon, Mavis and Winnifred said not a word, nor sang along with the radio, nor cast any of their usual blessings and teases. Without those kindnesses, the work was just drudgery, and Beulah was tired out long before quitting time. After five, she collected her Tupperware from the sink in the break area and went out front to wait for Jim. Mavis and Winnifred and some of the other women from Pine Branch trudged out to the highway to wait for the bus, and Beulah saw them there a few minutes later when Jim drove her home.
“Klan, maybe,” Jim said, when she recounted what the women had told her, “or who knows, could be one of their own down there. Maybe somebody had a grudge against the family.” He drove with one hand, keeping the other cupped over his bad knee. The cuffs of his overalls were covered in pink dust so Beulah knew he’d been carving on a headstone made of red granite. Jim did the fancy artwork at the monument yard. He could do angels with wings outspread and twining flowers of every kind, but the most common requests were for “The Old Rugged Cross” and “Praying Hands.”
“I don’t know how anybody could do something so cruel,” Beulah said.
“Pray for mercy in this world,” Jim said. “It’s all we can do.”
“Pray for mercy in this world,” Jim said. “It’s all we can do.” Jim was more watchful of his own ways and more prayerful than Beulah. That was because he’d fallen away in his youth, like the Prodigal Son, drinking and carrying on in sin. It had ruined his first marriage, and if he hadn’t been born again, it probably would have cost him his life.
Beulah had first met Jim after Wednesday Bible Study, a mix-and-mingle opportunity the young people at their church referred to as “Adam and Evening.” She was a year out of high school, and Jim told her that he was attracted to a look she had, “Kind of lit-up, like you were expecting something good.” Expecting what? she’d asked. “I don’t know,” he’d said, “the Second Coming of the Lord?” He’d looked down and swirled the punch in his cup, smiling in a way that pulled a dimple in his left cheek. “Tell you the truth,” he said, “I was hoping you were expecting me.”
When they got home, they found that Lonny’s pickup was now blocking the driveway. Jim honked to get his attention. The younger man came out to greet them and move his truck over to make room for Jim’s. He was like a skinny version of his father, right up to the curly brown hair and the one-sided dimple when he smiled. When the two trucks were parked side-by-side, Lonny swung his door in a way that blocked Beulah from opening her passenger door. He always pretended he didn’t realize it whenever he did some little thing that hindered her. She rolled down her window to call him on it, just as Jim limped around from the other side. “Where were you last night?” Jim demanded, “and what were you doing with my gun without permission?”
Lonny pulled a grin like taffy candy, ready to talk his way out of anything. He’d been eight years old when Beulah became his stepmother, and that smile had worked on her every time, at least while the trouble he got into could still be described as pranks and scrapes. “We went coon hunting,” he told his father, “me and Bob and Ferrell. We were out in the woods all night.”
“Coons?” Jim said. “Why didn’t you ask to take Finder?” Jim’s young Bluetick was shaping up to be one of the best coonhounds around.
Lonny shrugged. “I thought the boys were bringing their dogs. Turned out they didn’t.”
“What kind of hunting do you do without a dog?” Jim nudged his son aside and reached behind the seat of Lonny’s truck to pull out the shotgun. He broke open the breech, took out the red shell, and shoved it in his pocket.
Lonny turned up his hands in a show of innocence. “We were just funning. I didn’t do anything. Didn’t even shoot your gun.”
The two men walked around to the back yard, where Finder bounced against the chain-link fence of his kennel, bawling and baying at the sight of his master. Beulah was about to go in and start supper when she walked past the bed of Lonny’s truck and remembered about the blue jays feasting there in the morning. She took out her handkerchief and held it close to her nose, in case there was something bad-smelling when she peered over the tailgate. She crumpled the cloth against her mouth when she saw. The jays had been catching flies, big ones, that swarmed over a tangle of rope in the truck bed. It was smeared reddish-brown with clotted blood.
Beulah kept the handkerchief wadded hard against her lips and teeth, as if she were staunching her own blood. She had to stifle a whimper. She didn’t want to show any weakness as she marched into the back yard. Jim was sitting on the steps, with the shotgun propped beside him. Lonny was playing with Finder, getting the dog to tug on an old pillowcase. “What did you do?” she demanded.
Lonny didn’t look up from his game. “That’s how she always starts,” he muttered.
Jim gave him a sharp look. “What did you say?”
“What’d I do now?” Lonny said. “That’s how she always starts on me.”
“Praying’s not going to change what they did.”
“What is that rope in the back of your truck?” she said. “Jim, his rope with the hooks on the ends—it’s all bloody.” Jim pushed himself up off the step and limped toward the driveway. Lonny let go of the pillowcase, and Finder sprang away with it. “That boy last night,” Beulah said. “He was tied by a rope and dragged on the road till he was torn to death.”
Lonny kept his eyes on the dog. “I don’t even know what you’re talking about.”
Jim came back from looking in the truck bed. He was wheezing, and his left hand had a tremor. “Your tow rope,” he said, “why’s it got blood on it?” It wasn’t Jim’s regular aggravated voice; it was quiet and hoarse, as if he could only whisper his anger.
Lonny shrank back. He wore the cornered expression he’d had as boy when he was caught in some misdeed. “I told you, we were in the woods all night.”
“You didn’t even bother to clean it up.” Jim said.
“I didn’t do anything,” Lonny said. “It was Bob. I didn’t even want to be there.”
“I heard that boy was retarded,” his father said.
“He came out flapping his arms and yelling, so Bob said, ‘He wants a ride,’ They put him in the back and drove him over all the bumps and potholes out there, and then he started crying to go home. When they stopped, he’d crapped himself all down the back of his pants. Bob says, ‘We’ll take him home, only he stinks too bad, so we’ll hook him to the trailer hitch and make him run home.’”
Beulah swayed from side to side. A taste of rust rose in her throat. How could Lonny even tell a thing like that, straight-faced, without crying?
“I thought they were just going to give him a tug,” Lonny said, “to scare him, maybe till he fell down or something. Ferrell hooked the tow rope in that boy’s belt. The kid could’ve pulled it out, if he knew any better. And then we got in, and Bob punched it and dragged him all the way to Horn Bridge. I was yelling at him to stop.”
“Bob punched it? Since when did you ever let somebody else drive your truck?”
“I had the shotgun,” Lonny said. “I didn’t want to let it out of my hands, because I didn’t want Bob to get hold of it. I didn’t want him shooting it, so he was driving.”
Jim was quiet for a time, then he said, “Come here. Get down on your knees and pray with me.”
“I didn’t do anything,” Lonny said. “Praying’s not going to change what they did.”
He looked scared, the way he had when he was just a boy. He still had some of that little-boy sweetness in his looks.
Beulah thought Lonny didn’t want to pray, because that might draw God’s light down on him, like the jack lights hunters used to shine deer at night. “Then you need to come forward,” she said, “tell what you know,”
“Tell?” Lonny’s voice creaked like a hinge. “And then what? Get Bob and Bob’s brothers and his whole family down on me? It won’t be only some retard that gets dragged!”
He might be right, Beulah thought. Those violent, trashy people that Lonny ran with, what if they took some horrible revenge on him for telling? What if she and Jim were forced to mourn the way Mavis and her family did?
Jim sat down on the back step. His breath whistled through his nose. “You need to get away from here,” he said. “Pack up your things and get as far from here as you can—not your mom’s, they’ll look there. Texas, maybe, as far as you can get.” Beulah felt a thrill of hope at the idea of Lonny leaving at last, taking this awful thing with him.
“Nobody’s going to know,” Lonny said. “Nobody saw anything. This’ll all blow over, Pa.”
“I want you gone,” Jim said. “You’re going to have to stay away, and some way or other, you’re going to have to get right with Jesus.” He picked up the shotgun and turned to go inside. “And one thing you better do first—right now. Hose off that tow rope. Clean it up.”
Beulah remembered the flies buzzing over the tangle of rope, and thought yes, wash it clean! In a crazy-minded moment, it occurred to her that Mavis and Winnifred would know how to remove foul matter from anything, though she wondered if even the industrial washers at the Pristine could remove the stains of torture and murder.
Beulah watched Lonny as he uncoiled the garden hose. He looked scared, the way he had when he was just a boy. He still had some of that little-boy sweetness in his looks. She’d had what, two or three years when she could’ve done something with him? Two or three years when he was still young enough that he might’ve taken to her, accepted her love? But she’d been having her own babies then, and that’s where her love went.
It was just turning dusk, the trees black against a sky furrowed with peach-colored clouds. Beulah felt as if God were lifting her in the air and twisting her at the waist, once around, then twice, wringing her like a rag. Lonny gave her a sullen look and walked off. Finder pranced beside him, nosing his hand with the chewed-up pillowcase, trying to resume their game.
“Evil happens in the heat of the moment, Beulah. And sometimes you nor anybody else can stop it.”
Jim was standing in the wash room when she came through the screen door. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I didn’t know what to do.”
Jim looked exasperated, but then he sighed and his eyes were just tired. “It’s not on you,” he said. “It’s on me and him, but we’ve all got to keep this to ourselves.” He slowly unbuttoned the top half of his overalls and shucked it down over his belly so he could wash up. “He’s my boy, Beulah. I didn’t do right by him when he growing up, and now he’s tangled up with this. The thing can’t be undone, but I can still give him some kind of chance to redeem himself.”
“It’s not just between you and Lonny,” she said. She thought about that big jack light of God’s, shining down on them, blinding their eyes. Showing them and their sins. “They murdered that boy—in a horrible—just the cruelest way.”
“Not Lonny!” Jim said. “Not him. He was just there. You heard him.”
“Even if he was just there,” Beulah said. “He should of….”
Jim swiped a towel over his wet face. “Should of what? Evil happens in the heat of the moment, Beulah. And sometimes you nor anybody else can stop it.” He dropped the towel on the rim of the sink. “I know. You think I haven’t seen it?” He pulled up his overalls. “Now, we’re done talking about it.”
Done? Beulah thought, though she knew he meant it—the subject was closed. But how could they go to church, with this knowledge between them? Or Jim, how could he tap his chisels on the tombstones of righteous people? Or her, how could she trade teases and Bible verses with Mavis and Winnifred? Nothing is covered up that will not be revealed, or hidden that will not be known.
Jim prayed an extra-long grace before supper, and then he was quiet through the rest, while Little Jim went on about the Bulldogs’ game, and Katie begged to get out of doing the dishes because she had so much homework. Lonny never came in. Jim turned in early, and he was asleep, or at least still, when Beulah came to bed. After she’d said her prayers, she lay awake thinking about Lonny’s story until her stomach ached. Whatever you have said in the dark shall be heard in the light, and what you have whispered in private rooms shall be proclaimed on the housetops. She’d learned that verse in Vacation Bible School, and back then it was more about stopping the girls from gossiping than it was about keeping secrets. There was something from Proverbs, too, but she couldn’t remember it exactly, something about he who holds his tongue stays out of trouble. She piled her pillows and finally fell asleep sitting up in the bed.
Beulah wished they’d gone to a movie, or anywhere, so they would not have heard what they heard.
The next day, as Jim was taking her to work, Beulah thought about what she would say to her—what, her friends? They could never be that. She didn’t even know what their husbands looked like. Or their children, though she knew Mavis had three nearly grown, and Winnifred had a grandbaby. She couldn’t have them over or go to them. But at work, she’d rejoiced in them. What would she say, “Blessed are they that mourn: for they shall be comforted?” It was hard to see what comfort there could be.
Lonny’s pickup was still in the driveway when they left. She and Jim didn’t speak about him leaving.
Mavis and Winnifred just said a quiet good morning when she came in, and it didn’t seem like the time to quote scripture about being comforted. Would it bring them any comfort if she told what she knew? Given that it was a colored boy who was killed, would the sheriff even do anything about it? But how could that matter? Wasn’t it the same terrible sin, the murder of one of God’s precious children?
Beulah’s stomach felt as miserable as ever, and she drank water with bicarb during the first break. The women from Pine Branch weren’t allowed to use the break area. They filled their water jugs at the tap outside and took their food and snacks to their own bench against the back wall. At lunch, Beulah sat with Harriet Townley, who’d been to the movies the night before. She’d wanted to see a comedy, something about the mad world, but her husband had insisted on seeing the John Wayne western instead. Beulah’s church didn’t object to movies if they were family fare, but Jim seldom wanted to go. Beulah wished they’d gone to a movie, or anywhere, so they would not have heard what they heard.
When Jim picked her up from work, he told how the new lift operator at the yard had dropped and broken a black-granite double monument, just when it was supposed to be hauled out to the cemetery. They were going to have to re-cut and carve the whole thing. Beulah sat with her hands in her lap. “We’ve got to tell somebody about Lonny,” she said.
Jim drove for a while without speaking. “I’m sending him away,” he said. “I’m casting him out of our family.”
It was kinder of God, she thought, to give parents a child who was simple than one who was cruel.
“It’s not just us and our family. It’s murder and just … godawful cruelty.” It was kinder of God, she thought, to give parents a child who was simple than one who was cruel. Yet the loss of a sweet, simple child would break your heart forever.
Jim pulled the truck over to the side of the road. In front of them was a billboard of a man who’d lost the election for county sheriff a couple of weeks before. Beulah wondered if her husband were about to admonish her for taking the Lord’s name in vain.
“I asked Lonny to pray with me,” he said. “I wanted him to feel it in his conscience. He’s got to find his way back to the Lord.” He turned to her and she could see the pain on his face. “Would you pray with me now?”
Beulah sat quietly while he prayed the Lord’s Prayer. Jim seemed to hesitate at “forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us.” She said “amen” along with him, and then, in his own words, he asked Jesus for guidance. Beulah could tell he didn’t understand that they’d already been given an answer, on that billboard right in front of them. He started up the truck and turned back onto the road.
“You’d better drop me at the sheriff’s,” she said.
“No, Beulah. Come on home. We’ll talk to Lonny.”
“The sheriff,” she said. “Take me to the sheriff or take me to Emmy’s.” She wasn’t altogether sure that her sister would take her in, if it was about trouble like this.
Jim drove for a while in silence, passing the turnoff for the Courthouse Square where the sheriff’s office was. His nose whistled and his chest worked so hard that his head reared back a little with every breath. The telephone poles along the road went past slower and slower, but he seemed not to notice. A flatbed with a load of concrete blocks honked and went around them. About halfway home, he pulled into the driveway of a sheet-metal shop and turned the truck around. “All right.” His cough rasped of stone dust. As he parked in front of the sheriff’s office, he said, “You go on then. Have your say. You know this won’t do any of us any good.”
The lobby of the sheriff’s office was rank with cigarette smoke and the smell of Lysol from a mop bucket in the corner. Two deputies leaned on the front counter, laughing with a fat man in a sweat-blotched white shirt. Every one of them was bigger than Jim, and Beulah had to walk right up to the counter to get them to notice her. “I have something to tell about that young man that got killed on Pinesap Road,” she said.
When she finished, the head deputy unfolded his arms and scratched the back of his ear. “It’s all very well what you’re saying, ma’am, but are you sure you want to put those accusations in a formal statement? An official document? Because if it don’t comport with the facts as we find them, it could put you in a world of trouble.” Beulah held her purse tightly against her middle to keep herself from trembling, but she managed to say that yes, she did want to make a statement.
* * *
They stayed in town through the winter, hearing the ugly talk that Beulah, the mean stepmother, had betrayed Jim’s son, and that Jim stood by and let her do it. The talk was at the monument yard, the Pristine, and even their church. Mavis and Winnifred kept to themselves, but they didn’t turn from her in anger or disdain. Beulah knew that if they all began speaking again, the deaconesses would probably forgive her and her family, but they could never again know the sweetness of teasing and talking in scripture. Anyway, Beulah did not feel she was ready to receive forgiveness.
She wondered if her heart was hardened, but if anything, it felt more tender.
Harriet Townley and some of the other women at the Pristine turned away whenever Beulah came to the break area. One day, Mr. Hazeltine called her into the office. “I’ve had complaints,” he said. “You understand.” Beulah didn’t, but she gathered her things and rode home on the bus.
After several months, the county prosecutor declined to press charges in the dragging murder. No witnesses. Lack of evidence. Lonny had changed his story, saying he and his friends were nowhere near Pinesap Road that night. He’d cleaned the back of his truck, and the tow rope disappeared. Anything Beulah said was just hearsay.
Lonny went back to his mother in Charleston. In the spring he was caught stealing a generator from a construction site and sentenced to seven months in the penitentiary. As Jim had said, there was no good result for anyone. Beulah wondered if she ought to feel sorry for what she’d done, but she didn’t, even when she prayed on it. She wondered if her heart was hardened, but if anything, it felt more tender.
As soon as school was out, Jim moved the family to Greenville. As good a carver as he was, he had no trouble getting a job at another monument company. They found a big Baptist church that he liked, one with an active youth ministry for the kids. Beulah eventually took a job as a checker at the Winn Dixie. It was hard on a person’s bunions, standing at the cash register all day, but much easier on her back than the laundry had been. She used her employee discount to try various indigestion remedies, and her dyspepsia eased up. Jim sometimes tried to tell her that the expectant look of her young womanhood was coming back to her face. As if saying so might make it true.
Corey Flintoff is a former foreign correspondent for NPR. His fiction has appeared in the Virginia Quarterly Review, Glimmer Train, Ploughshares, and other journals.
