The Way Back

Lori Moyer is devastated by an e-mail from her son in far away Wisconsin. "They are tearing down the old dairy barn on your home place and selling it off in pieces," he writes, "should I try to get something of it for you?" Realizing the barn is an icon of a way of life, Lori tries to stop the demolition, to no avail. When a journal is found built into a beam in the hayloft, her son sends it to her, explaining that,"no one here knows John Chapman who wrote this, perhaps you remember him." Yes, Lori indeed remembers John as a father figure, who thought of her as "his own little girl," who rescued her often, and told her stories that guided her life. He was hired to finish the barn and stayed on to run the dairy. Lori types in his name on a search engine and the Internet sends back two news items from 1925, telling of John's disappearance from his own farmstead, and describing how a posse found him a week later hiding in the loft of his barn. "Why that happened five years before he came to work for us," Lori reasons, "perhaps it explains why he came." Dismayed but intrigued, Lori begins to read The Necklace of Words, John's lyrical account of his life after fighting in the trenches of World War I. Beginning in 1930 when he was hired, John writes eloquently in poetry and prose, of his ongoing battle with what today we call PTSD. As she reads, Lori finds herself spellbound, as she once was as a child sitting at John's feet, but this time, hearing of his pain and longing, reliving his nightmares, and also encountering her parents through his eyes. She reads of Whinneboujou, and his Mule Sweat Lodge where John and her father went to learn the wisdom of the ancient Anishinabe Indians. Did those encounters help John heal from his loses? Did they help him to trust in the veteran's group he later joined? Lori revisits her animal companions, alive again in his words; she laughs at her father's Irish sayings, and travels with John up Jacob's Ladder, the mystical light beam through the high windows that turned the barn loft into a cathedral. "The War of the Worlds" was broadcast in 1938 and the neighbors gathered in the great dairy barn, listening to the radio there, grimly planning to make their last stand. Indeed, John, had encountered first hand the poisoned gas and the machines of war. Lori meets herself as a child, and there arises a love and respect for her heritage and herself. “Tis at the edge of the petal that love waits,” John's mother once said, and now Lori understands as she never has before. She sees her garden is filled with the English roses John had loved. Her windows shimmer with stained glass, layered to catch the light at every angle; and Lori thinks of the marbles John gave to her at special times, each one a polished bubble pierced by color shot through on wings of light—crystal spheres as pure as molten love. As Lori fingers John's journal, feeling close to him, she knows that she has crafted her life around what they had shared in the dominion of the barn, and the words she has playfully used for years has new meaning to her: "My barn burned down and now I see the moon."