Hundred Miles to Nowhere by Korenne Elisa;

Author:Korenne, Elisa;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: North Star Press of St. Cloud
Published: 2017-05-20T16:00:00+00:00

26

Paper Ballots

Those officials said: you’re not like us

We don’t want to hear your preachin’

Don’t try to fight us

We’ve got the might of right behind us

– “Hold On—the Dr. Bronner Song”

November

In the rearview mirror, I caught a last glimpse of white columns over red siding. I had figured out how to handle the driveway, braking slightly into the deep curve after the teardrop loop. My new house disappeared behind a privacy screen of trees and brush so thick it blocked the view of our house from the road even after the leaves had fallen and faded.

Beyond the curve, the Wells cemetery came up quickly on my right. The two small graves were magnified by the field around them, like a tragic miniature augmented by a heavy frame. I sped up and gazed ahead, trying to ignore the reminder of Buck’s death.

It took a few minutes of driving before the car warmed up. I bopped along to a new album I had traded a CD for at a performance with another songwriter the week before. The car hadn’t heated up enough to remove my wool cap when I arrived at my new Minnesota polling place. I rolled my vehicle off the empty two-lane road and bumped onto the flattened grass parking lot of Bluffton Township Hall. The upbeat song was silenced with the turn of my key, and the wind made a low whistle across the plains.

The light gray paint of the former one-room schoolhouse blended into the overcast sky of early winter purgatory. Two Buick Regals already in the lot were unobtrusive shades of silver and slate, and two pick-up trucks were so covered with dust they looked gray, too. In the monochrome landscape of faded farmland, my burnt orange corduroy pants were the only sign that color hadn’t drained from the world. I huddled my shoulders against the November wind and speed-walked to a single-width door cut into clapboard.

For a moment, I wondered if I had come to the right place. Unlike the line of people I had waited in when I had voted the year before in Brooklyn, there was no one waiting outside. In New York City, queues ran for blocks out of the entrance to the local elementary school. On the clipboard for last names beginning with “K” and “L,” I helped the volunteer flip through dozens of pages until they found “Ko.” From there I moved into another queue where a chorus line of people waited for one of the voting machines that ran in pairs from one end of the gymnasium to the other. In Bluffton, I parked on dried grass and walked into a one-room schoolhouse that smelled of woodsmoke and pencil shavings.

Five older white people sat at a folding card table by a 1930s-era furnace. I could tell by the words “buck” and “stand” that the conversation was about the upcoming deer season. I stood, waiting for acknowledgment. The conversation was animated for Minnesota. Deer season seemed to get people excited. A man with a red face noticed me first and peered at me suspiciously.

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