The Mesa
Taos, New Mexico

By Tracy Tucker

I am an American pilgrim. I’ve visited a hundred holy sites trying to find my way, seeking an intercession, hoping to meet my gods in the air. I’ve found myself at Walden Pond, naturally, and the stone wall at Robert Frost’s farm, but there are many stations on this journey: the American Gothic house, Steinbeck’s “Mother Road,” First Avenue in Minneapolis, and a spot on the side of a Missouri highway where Ira Louvin died.

But by profession, as a writer, as an archivist, I hold one figure above them all — Willa Cather. I’ve traveled where she traveled, slept where she slept, and chased the horizons that populate her novels and short stories. From her birth house in Gore, Virginia, to her grave in Jaffrey, New Hampshire, and so many places she wandered in between, I’ve been there, trailing after her spirit, looking for my own.

Cather wrote in a 1912 letter that, for the first time, she was glad to be away from New Mexico and Arizona; though she enjoyed the summer, she “was ready to leave when the time came.  … The country,” she continued, “is wonderful, fabulous; but after all, ‘dans le desert,’ as Balzac said, ‘il y a tout, et il n’y a rien; Dieu sans les hommes.’” The desert is everything and nothing. God without men.

And so I am in Taos, seeing the sights, but it’s the desert that calls me. For days, I let myself be led and, while I keep in mind a place to sleep, the roads just run.  I think of Cather’s letter quoting Balzac. I see everything and nothing.

On the mesa west of town, the road runs out but I walk on, the scent of chamiso pardo and rabbitbrush rising like prayers as I brush by. I breathe in their incense. Cactus spikes whisper against my pack. I have visions. I try to fathom Cather in this land. She rides through at a distance, but I can barely make her out. Between us are other figures, but they might be mirages. Smoke and sand. Wind shaking the wild oats.

A dried fruit of a tree cholla clings to the back of my coat. I don’t discover it until I’m back in Nebraska, and I tuck it away in the console with other relics: sea glass from Nantucket Harbor and limestone from my family’s farm and corroded buttons found buried in the dirt of an abandoned Colorado soddy.

At home I look at Cather’s letter again. After she quotes Balzac, she writes, “You see, you get so lonely (I mean your soul gets lonely) in a land which has had only a geological history. Your spirit can’t find anything to hang on by!” But it can, I think, and mine has hung on to that mesa, returning again and again, a lost traveler walking in circles in the only place that feels real, independent of man.

Back in Cather’s Nebraska, the cholla fruit, dense and desiccated, splits its skin, and its seeds pour out, tiny miracles. Their prickles are everywhere I touch, snagging. When I think I’m rid of them, I notice tiny cholla growing in the sand at the edge of the yard. I tease them out, nurture them, but I don’t think they need me. The desert is real. I’m the mirage.

Tracy Tucker is the Education Director and Archivist at the National Willa Cather Center in Red Cloud, Nebraska, and an Affiliate Fellow of the Center for Great Plains Studies. Tucker’s research, writing, and photography focuses on the Plains and has appeared in Old Northwest Review, Midwestern Gothic, Whirlwind, Open Mic, Prairie Fire, the Willa Cather Review, and others. A forthcoming chapter comparing the work of Willa Cather, Laura Ingalls Wilder, and Sanora Babb will be published in Unknown No More: Essays on Sanora Babb (Oklahoma University Press, 2021).

Willa Cather Special Edition

Please enjoy this special volume of Literary Landscapes focused exclusively on Willa Cather. Although Cather is well known as a writer of the plains, she has substantial attachments to places all across the country — and that means we get to stretch Literary Landscapes beyond our customary Midwestern boundaries!

Special thanks to the National Willa Cather Center for access to portraits of Cather and archival photos of Mount Monadnock and the Pavelka Farmstead. Located in Cather’s hometown of Red Cloud, Nebraska, the NWCC is an archive, museum, and study center owned and operated by the Willa Cather Foundation, which also maintains the largest collection of historic sites and landscapes related to any American writer.

Thank you for reading! If you would like to contribute to Literary Landscapes, click here for more information and a list of potential sites.

Andy Oler, Outpost Editor
The New Territory

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Brick District Playhouse
Fulton, Missouri

By Alex Dzurick

The 1940 novel Kings Row once so offended residents of Fulton, Missouri, that you couldn’t find a copy on the shelves of the local library. You could, however, in the very same town, find a copy on my mother’s bookshelf. She was a history teacher who taught classes on Missouri history, so even as a child, I had heard the rumors: Kings Row was based on Henry Bellamann’s life growing up in Fulton, and his frank portrayal of the darker side of life in my hometown did not earn him admiration by its social elites.

With all my mother’s connections to the book, I’m not surprised her copy occupied such a prominent place in our home, next to heirlooms and family photographs. In middle school, I asked if I could read it to complete a book challenge. She said that I could as long as I was careful with her copy, and I remember stretching out on the living room sofa, devouring the novel over just a few days. It’s a shocking story, exploring topics like euthanasia and incest, so looking back I’m surprised that I was trusted enough as a young teenager to handle the material.

Take a drive down Fulton’s Court Street today, and you’ll still see the Victorian-style homes that those elites once lived in. It’s easy to imagine how young Mr. Bellamann must have felt seeing those homes and knowing it was their occupants who bullied him, ostensibly for his German heritage and friendships with kids from the poorer, industrial neighborhoods. In Kings Row, on the other hand, Bellamann’s alter ego Parris Mitchell is quite well liked by everyone. Still, he discovers the sinister side of those wealthy residents while apprenticing under the secretive Dr. Tower, who is likely based on a real local doctor.

A bit further down Court Street, you’ll find the Brick District Playhouse, which served as the town’s only movie theater from 1928 to 2006. My mother worked there part-time for decades, and I followed in her footsteps when I turned 16. The small cinema had just two screens, with one built into a former balcony, and the lobby doors opened directly onto the brick streets of downtown Fulton. The brick building’s marquee was changed by hand even in its last years, and it wasn’t unheard of for birds and bats to swoop down from the ceiling during a film. Today, the building has been converted into a live performance venue, hosting plays, concerts, and lectures.

The theater itself is part of Kings Row lore, thanks to a 1942 film adaptation starring Robert Cummings as Parris Mitchell and future president Ronald Reagan as Drake, one of Parris’s wealthy friends. The movie did little to appease Fulton’s residents, exposing their town’s secrets to an even wider audience. Tensions had eased by the later part of the century, however, and several cast members came to Fulton in June 1988 to celebrate their source material (Reagan did not attend, as he was busy politicking). My mom had the opportunity to meet them at the theater. Her copy of Kings Row has a red autograph inside the front cover — “To Beautiful Lola. Love, Bob Cummings.”

Later, I had the chance to watch the film, which brought characters like Parris, Drake, and Dr. Tower to life in new ways for me. The novel’s darkest themes were removed to satisfy film codes, but it remained a tale of small town hypocrisy. And the film’s visuals are eerily reminiscent of the older parts of Fulton, as evidenced by the historic photos and sketches that hung in our home. Despite the passage of some 50 years between the film’s release and my own youth, it became apparent to me how easily Fulton’s residents would have seen themselves in Bellamann’s work.

I now live just outside of Philadelphia, where Bellamann was a dean at a prestigious music school before writing Kings Row. When I return to Fulton these days, and I pass those grand old Court Street homes just a few blocks north of the movie theater, I can’t help but look at them through Bellamann’s eyes, seeing the town in its honesty, with all its grandeur and all its faults.

Alex Dzurick is an educator and writer originally from Fulton, Missouri. He has published in The New Territory, NSTA’s The Science Teacher, and NAAEE’s Urban Environmental Education. Currently living in the Philadelphia region, Alex spends most of his time (when he’s not teaching) writing quizbowl questions, building crossword puzzles, or reading random Wikipedia articles.

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