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Fury by Bruce Duane Martin ...she fell, crumpled, to the floor, her last life gathering in a thick red pool around her head. Extending her paws toward me, she shuddered, stiffened, and was still. Click to read Essay Profile of Author Bio of Author from ETG Essay, Late-breaking Developments Author's Comment on the ETG Experience Updated Bio Click to Purchase Send email to the author (The copyright on this essay is held by the author.  For permission to duplicate: copyright@cunepress.com)

Fury
The twins arrived prematurely in the June heat of 1963. "Feeding eleven mouths already," my father said. "Guess two more won’t make us any poorer." Then the summer rains stopped. In the fall, crops failed, beef prices fell, and farmers began dumping their milk in the Welds.

In November, a neighbor gave my father a sick, emaciated dog. "Can we keep her?" my brothers and I pleaded. "If we get her healthy, can we keep her?" My father relented. "But remember," he said, "the dog stays in the barn, not in the house. And she better learn to work the cattle." My brothers and I named the dog Goldie. We loved her, cared for her, nursed her back to health.

One cold December Sunday, I trudged to the barn to do the evening chores. Goldie bounded across the yard, yapping and running circles around me and licking my hand. My eyes watered as I stepped into the shadowy interior of the barn. I cleaned the stalls, spread clean sawdust, threw hay down from the mow, and slopped the hogs.

Then I slouched across the unlit yard, watching the clouds swirling around the barn, scudding across the corn field into the forested darkness beyond. Lightning flashed, yellowing the entire eastern horizon. Thunder stumbled and mumbled drunkenly across the sky, and the cold night began to howl. I turned and raced for the house with Goldie nipping my heels.

Goldie whimpered and lunged for the door and safety of the farmhouse foyer. Catching her long shaggy coat, I stroked her head and guided her to safety under the broken-down porch just as the deluge broke. In seconds, the unseeded lawn became a muddy torrent, deepening pools in the cattle yard near the barn.

In the mud-room, my brothers and I began removing our clothing. Suddenly the door burst open—driving wind and rain—and my father charged in, sputtering, drenched to the bone. Seeing her last chance, Goldie bolted through the open door, nearly knocking him off his feet. She sat trembling behind the mud-room door.

Grim-faced and muttering, my father reached for the cowering dog, groped for the collar buried beneath her matted coat, and jerked her, choking, from behind the door. Reaching just as quickly, fluidly, with the other hand for the cast-iron bootjack, he brought it down with crushing force on Goldie’s head. Screaming in silence, I watched helplessly as he struck her blow after blow. Finally, he released her and she fell, crumpled, to the floor, her last life gathering in a thick red pool around her head. Extending her paws toward me, she shuddered, stiffened, and was still.

Standing motionless in his manure-covered, blood-splattered coveralls, my father stared, detached, at his callused hands, his breathing heavy and ragged. Finally, taking hold of Goldie’s leg, he dragged her through the foyer, opened the door, and dumped her body over the side of the porch into the mud and water below. Following the swath of blood across the grimy linoleum floor, I winced when Goldie’s head bounced over the threshold and disappeared. My eyes watering, ears pounding, and lungs surging into my throat, I swallowed and turned my back to finish removing my chore clothes.

"What’re you bawlin’ about?" my father asked.

The storm subsided, its fury spent, and I readied myself for Sunday evening services. When the tiny Main Creek congregation began to sing, my father sat rigid, slumped forward in the pew with his face in his hands. His lips trembled and fists clenched. During the second hymn—"Marvelous Grace of Our Loving Lord"—tears slid down between his fingers, leaving little dark stains that glistened on the hard pine floor.

Profile
Above his pale sheaf of chopped hair, Princeton’s Latin diploma declares Bruce Duane Martin a Master of Divinity. At his back, the half-acre of books on theology and psychology announce his profession as university chaplain.

But Bruce talks about his writing: personal narratives garnered from boyhood years on a Wisconsin farm and an Ojibwa Indian Reservation. Places harsh and cruel; without books or the leisure to read them. No culture at Angle Inlet—on the border of Manitoba, Ontario, and Minnesota—to nudge a boy towards writing. That would come later. After the sermons: First in his youth with a tent evangelist who later robbed a bank and went to prison; then the polished Presbyterian homily to a Mennonite congregation in Maine; and now a university pulpit. Always, a weaver of tales—oral vignettes, he calls them—for sermon illustrations and his three children’s bedtime rituals. His audiences forgot his fine exegeses, but remembered the stories, many as dark as the emotional landscape of his youth.

So, now Bruce writes stories. "Hard work," he declares of the task—writing at midnight, pen to paper for the first draft, wrestling with language and memory. Bruce says, "I want life’s experiences to have mattered—must get them down." But there is nothing nostalgic here. A driven man, sometimes angry, he forges language that is as sinewy as his body. Without whining, without whimpering, without bitterness, without cynicism, his stories portray the redemptive capacity of personal suffering.

—Omar Eby

Bio
Bruce Duane Martin
Place of residence: Harrisonburg, Virginia.
Birthplace: Ladysmith, Wisconsin.
Grew up in: Ladysmith, Wisconsin, on a poor dairy farm, and Angle Inlet, Minnesota.
Day job: Chaplain and instructor in Bible and Religion Department, Eastern Mennonite University.
Education: B.A., Philosophy and Psychology, University of Wisconsin, Eau Claire. Master of Divinity, Princeton Theological Seminary. Currently a doctoral student at Princeton Theological Seminary.
Serial publications: Gospel Herald. Weather Vane. Festival Quarterly.
Accomplishments: Gave a speech at the Ladysmith County Court in fifth grade on soil conservation. Expelled from high school four times.
Award: A full academic scholarship to Princeton Theological while legally blind.
Family: Married to Jewel who, like me, is a minister in the Mennonite Church. We have three children, Jonathan, Sarah, and Arielle.
Current projects: Completing doctoral studies. Working on three longer pieces, an essay, and several short stories.
Favorite books: Snow Falling on Cedars by David Guterson, Saving Grace and Family Linen by Lee Smith.
Religious heritage: When the Civil War divided Virginia, Mennonites refused to bear arms for either side. Having fled from persecution in their homelands, Mennonites sought to abolish slavery and secure freedom for all people through nonviolent means. Today the largest concentration of Mennonites in the eastern United States is found in the Shenandoah Valley.
Favorite New Testament parable: Mark 5:24.
Beliefs: Shaped by orthodox Christian faith in general and by the Anabaptist/Mennonite traditions of community, service, and peacemaking in particular. Having grown up with Ojibwa people, I have a deep appreciation for other cultures and for the American Indian community in particular.
Cravings: Solitude. Time to read and write without interruption, and time with my wife, Jewel, and our three children.
Exercise: I run from five to nine miles most days.
Grew up with: Wally, a baby Woodchuck dropped by his mother on the highway. My mother nursed Wally from a bottle until he could eat pancakes from the kitchen table. Wally grew up without a clue about what it meant to be a woodchuck. He cleaned up scraps around the table, clicked his teeth at strangers, slept in my bed, and sat in the front seat of our 1960 Ford for the trip to town.
Favorite quote on writing: "Storytellers should be aware that they are dealing with dangerous materials. Life and death flow to us through stories. Words have almost unlimited power to destroy and to heal. . . . More lives have been destroyed by words than by bullets and more lives redeemed and made whole." The Healing Power of Stories by Daniel Taylor (Doubleday, 1996).

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