one

 

dog heaven – 8/1953

 

and along the scooping, interminable road with a fine

red dust that kicks up like facepowder and turns all the brown

latesummer leaves pink, i walk. one step at a time, as if each

step was the last time i'd feel solid ground under my feet. all

the sunflowers on the side of the road crumpled and suck-faced,

like denture-less, rattling old men, wheezing their seeds, suffering –

they peer down the road as if they know someone is coming.

 

and the loveless flea market of smaller blossoms perched, buttoned up,

they spin and toil, petticoated in dust, breathing through their mouths.

we all look up. the sun cracking the earth like an interrogator. all the muddy wet

spots from the storm that passed over two days ago curling and separating

like continents. the woods mumble. the same woods were I saw the harry

townsend's family distilling moonshine in and where the great dane that

was daddy's pride and joy is buried in a gorilla sized plot

 

with a good christian crucifix at its head, to bear it up to

wherever it is supposed to go. if i stop for too long, i can hear their voices,

the leaves with all the chlorophyll baked out of them rustling and shh-ing

like mothers hushing their babies and the spring gabbing in the ruts

and rusty inbetweens of stream-boulders and skipping stones. I hear them whispering

to me and telling me what a traitor

I am.

 

my shoes are falling apart, the feel flapping dully,

and the shadows in the woods cloak

and mumble like plague priests.

 

–
 

grandpa – 8/1952

 

He had been dying for so long that nobody expected to find grandpa lying with unblinking eyes and a stopped heart in his rockingchair that afternoon. They found him outside under the long, cool veranda, retreated up in bundles of sweltering winter clothing, like a touched night snail. His jaw loose, papery white bandanas of skin. The inky blots and diagrams of age blotching his arms. The tattoo of that woman he met in Tulsa shriveled up and purple in her funeral veils of ink, a stain on his peeling upper arm, bleeding through his skin, into his stopped bloodstream, and down the sluices and canals leading to his botched, fluting heart. I stand back and let daddy carry him inside. His head lolls to the side, his face rusty and old and oily with death, like some old used car part.

 

The rocking chair nodded gently. Ava stopped it with her hand. Daddy had me open the door and stepped inside. The smell of the railroads was even stronger now that he was dead. The grease of a working man, the coaldust, the strike and yawn of iron cables against one another. I stood there for a moment looking over the property. Looking down the dirt road that led into town.

 

The peach tree's petals dropped, white and mewling, like milkless cats' tongues.

 

Ava laughed a little. I think I'm gonna that old b*****d tearing up around the place telling dad what to do. Lord, I loved that.

 

I nod.

 

It's chilly, I say.

 

Yeah.

 

Not even halfway done with August yet.

 

Yeah.

 

Then a storm must be coming. See over those mountains. Bet you a dollar we'll be drowning by tomorrow.

 

Ava looked at me.

 

He loved you a lot.

 

I look down. I look at the wheat fields, and at the cockpit of lilies that Penny's been tending to by the pond, and the old, gutless tractor oozing and knuckled forward, afraid of dying in its sleep.

 

Yeah.

 

The screen door opened. Daddy stepped onto the porch and we stopped talking and the night started falling and grandpa's chair rocked and rocked and rocked.

 

–

 

come unto me – 7/1952

 

praying among the poppies, their shocked heads nodding and

their lips loose – they bow their heads and stand skinny in the tallgrass,

with the cicadas snowing their socketed buzz. daddy prays, and you can see

that vein worming in his forehead, as if the prayer was bleeding through

his pores. the poppies seem to stifle their laughter, like sunday school

children, and daddy's jaw grinds, his face red, his sermon

 

lying in pages on the ground next to him and the bible on

deadwood log, open to The Acts.

 

and when he practiced, he flung his arms to heaven, and we hid behind

the gray, dead fieldtrees – pinched and hollow and sifting the song from the wind

with its branches. i chewed grass, and penny played with carpenter ants,

black and bullying, and ava listened gravely as daddy screamed damnation

and spat bible verses to a cloudless sky and all the wickered trees would

knit their branches and nod and seem to agree, but

they have been around for a while.

 

the clouds return when he is finished, white and satisfied, like burped babies.

the organ reeds of the tallgrass strike up and the choir of the cicadas and daddy

massages the worm in his forehead and the wind flips the pages of the bible

aimlessly, as if it where a comic book that it had read a thousand times

before. we come out of hiding and bring him is lunch – cold turkey and rye

and as he eats we are silent and the poppies avoid our stares.