When I pulled John Ciardi’s translation of Dante’s The Divine Comedy off the shelf, all kinds of memories rose because the book marked the beginning of my own descent into Hell. I had vaguely remembered sitting in a room at Miller Williams’ house hearing him read but I wasn’t sure that’s how I remembered it until I opened the book and saw Ciardi’s signature.
I flipped through the book and saw my tiny handwriting and underlining all the way through to the end. I was shocked I had read the whole thing, not as an assignment for school but on my own. I wrote a line I thought came from Dante in my journal, “I did not die but nothing of my life remained” because that’s what happened in my life for the thirty-five years that followed. When I returned to Arkansas the fiction writer, William Harrison, looked at me kindly saying I was a woman who shed her skin often, that I was a new person.
Soon after Ciardi’s reading, I did the hard work of moving to the western suburbs of Chicago to start work as publicist for Crossway books. It’s miraculous that I got the job because I was not trained in marketing. I did come by the gift honestly with my father selling advertising for the Albany Times Union and my mother selling as much as a million dollars worth of real estate in a year.
I’d driven to Chicago during harvest season, watching combines clearing acres of fields. I thought of the farmer back in New York that I’d fallen in love with as a sort of beatific vision—I was a virgin, hoping for marriage, but the farmer was not the marrying type. I rode behind him in his tractor and wrote poems that earned me an MFA in poetry. Robert Siegel, my poetry teacher at Wheaton, recommended me for the job. He would publish a novel with Crossway and knew it needed publicity. Crossway aimed to publish Christian literary fiction, a mission I believed in.
I was hired just before winter break. When I arrived home in New York for Christmas I saw that my mother, who’d been round and overweight had become thin with jagged angles. She said she was glad to be thin after years of struggling with her weight. I said, “See a doctor. This can’t be good.”
It’s the pre-dawn orange half-moon I remember as I drove to Tulsa to take a flight to Chicago to find an apartment. I circled ads in the paper and visited apartments that depressed me. I settled on a ground floor one bedroom that smelled like new carpet. The address 121, 2021 South Wolf Road sounded like a sing song. There was a pool and locked doors and a hefty deposit. I would have to leave my dog in New York. I had to ration where I drove in order to afford to live there.
I pulled the book off my shelf because I signed up for Jonathan Pageau and Richard Rohlin’s class on the Inferno. Now, I don’t know what possessed me to spend five weeks studying hell, when I don’t think God loses any human made in his image. They say it’s God’s mercy, leaving people to their sins, ugly pictures Dante has shown as consequences for disordered loves, because that’s what they have freely chosen. I fear the things I’ve freely chosen–eating too much, reading my phone incessantly, walking away from someone whose pain I can’t bear, being angry. Dante assigned the gluttons to slush, pouring rain, and no substance. I fear the Lord will say I never knew you, depart from me.
Theologian David Bentley Hart has said, “It makes no more sense, then, to say that God allows creatures to damn themselves out of his love for them or out of his respect for their freedom than to say a father might reasonably allow his deranged child to thrust her face into a fire out of a tender regard for her moral autonomy.” And I cling to what Jesus says, “All that the Father giveth me shall come to me; and him that cometh to me I will in no wise cast out” (John 6:37). I cling to what Jesus says, “When I am lifted up, I will draw all men to myself” so that “all” includes me and everyone else.
I told a young friend all hell had broken loose when I read the book the first time. He asked if the book caused the hell.
No, no. But it gave me words for my walk then. (Now I’m not so sure but that it will raise hell.)
Back then, It was the beginning of my unknowing, a beginner’s mind that stood me in good stead as I learned how to be a publicist, by asking a few editors how to do the job, and assistants who should I talk to? It stood me in good stead as a teacher because I was free to let my students educate me.
The Sunday School chorus, “The Lord knows the way through the wilderness, all I have to do is follow” rang in my head those early months. I was a child reaching up to take God’s hand. I felt like the ground was dropping from under my feet.
I pulled my copy out of my bookshelf. It was not dog eared, but it was dog chewed. My Rottweiler Cane got a hold of the cover and chewed a corner. He destroyed the jacket. He was the dog of my grief, a dog I was able to own, when I moved away from 121 2021 S Wolf Road to an upstairs apartment in Elmhurst, over a kind, older couple. I opened the book and saw Ciardi had signed it: For Katie Pauley- with all good wishes from Dante Aligheri (per John Ciardi, unappointed secretary for D.A.)
I was drawn to The Divine Comedy because of the beatific vision. Dante fell in love with Beatrice when they were both children. Even though they never married, he was infatuated with her. When he found himself lost in a dark wood, she was one of the women who called him to find his way down through Hell, and up through Purgatory and into Paradise. She was his muse that called him to write the story.
As a young woman, I wondered what such a vision would look like. I’d fallen in love with that farmer who rented my parents’ land. He was ordinary, but the big machines, the magic he pulled from the soil, made him glimmer. I loved him so intensely I scared him, though I earned his friendship those long hours I sat behind him in the tractor and combine. He showed up in poems, a novel and essays.
As a writer I leaned into what it meant to be a virgin. My teachers teased me about my innocence, even though my poems were erotic and savvy about more than I should have known. One teacher said he didn’t think I’d be able to write poetry once I married. (Back then teachers and colleagues were not shy about offering opinions tinged with sexual innuendo. One teacher looked into my soul, his eyes burned, saying that my mother would be pleased because I was able to stop a man before intercourse, that teaching me was like that. But he taught me how to write an English sentence.)
One night, I walked in the woods behind our farmhouse because the night opened, and it felt safe to follow a logging road into the trees. I’ll tell you some nights it was too frightening even to walk down the road at midnight; the darkness bore down, leaden, ominous, even though our barn cats walked with me, my guardians against the powers. I walked into the woods hoping to see a unicorn. Back then, they were possible, their coat metallic white, a creature shy but fierce. He would have been safe if he came to my lap. No hunter followed. What would I have given to see one dance up to me, feel him nuzzle my palms, while I ducked his horn.
I would have been happy to see a white tail deer, but back then they were rare as silver dollars. But I did see the moon pop out from behind a tree, like a hot white pregnancy, growing and breaking free like a furnace door swung open.
I pulled the The Divine Comedy off the shelf, thumbed through it and memories shyly danced back. Weeping rose like a bubble but popped before it found my eyes. The next day when I walked, they found their way, seeping from my eyes.
I remember the orange moon in the early morning drive to Tulsa to catch a plane to Chicago to look for an apartment. I flew to Arkansas to pack up my apartment, the heavy weight on my legs. And the mover who came to pick up my things. The radiator hose on my car that needed fixing the morning I left and then a flat tire somewhere in Missouri, and the drive through snow when I arrived at midnight.
I had no bed the first weeks and slept on the floor until my boss sold me his couch. My loneliness ached for my dog. My parents sent furniture they’d stored in the attic. I bought ready-made drapes at Sears. The bank wouldn’t let me set up an account unless I had a $100 cash and I needed a card to use the grocery store. That little apartment was mine and smelled of home with the single bed, low riding chairs my mother sent and old scarred worktable I used for meals. It’s walls listened to my wail when my brother called saying our mother had died. She lived the expected nine months after the doctor said that’s all the time she had, a gestation for her being born to new life. She died on Labor Day.
I jogged through a graveyard before work, past a heater warming the dirt. I trotted past boys with banana bikes, who said “My how sexy.” Somehow, I was a natural at the job and secured national publicity for the company. I was my mother’s daughter, not knowing that I couldn’t do this. Somehow my rank inexperience did not stop me or catch me in my talking too much to kind people who did not repeat what I said. At lunch I drank Diet Coke and ate Coletti’s chili. God sent two friends, Pam and Jutti, who listened well, who carried me through the worst of it—living in a strange city, my mother dying and my father dying five months later. The journalists, too were kind, taking my calls, writing the stories I pitched. An Arkansas friend sent a glass blown unicorn, that I swept off the shelf when I dusted. Most of all I remember the orange half-moon over Tulsa.
If you’d like to read more of this story, as a novel, you can find The River Caught Sunlight on Amazon. If you’d like to subscribe to these essays, click here.