Faith
I had not thought of her until many years later driving on White Lightning Road with my son. We were passing the falling-down farmhouse, where I’d visited once with my mother. That’s where I saw the girl with a horse’s tail, I said, as if pointing out a type of tree or another sad dog on the side of the road. Murmured almost, as if to remind a part of myself.
She was galloping around the old-time kitchen with its enamel-topped washboard, the drain pipe visible below, a bin that had held flour slightly ajar, ordinary in those kitchens. The child, too young for me, playing off by herself. We sat on wooden chairs at the plain kitchen table with the old lady who I’d never met, drinking her sassafras tea I remember for its bitterness and my boredom. Nothing to eat. The cans of something my mother had left in a sack by the doorway. Then out of nowhere, the woman saying, would you like to see something? Calling the child to her and turning her around and pulling her pants down. There on her backside, just above the crack, was a nest of something like briars, bristling into stiff hairs a few inches long. Touch it, the woman said to my mother, who reached out in the quiet air. All of us waiting. The child, smiling to herself, unaffected. It was then I knew we had come to pray. Afterward, we never spoke of it. I’d like to say the prayer erased their shame– that I wanted to see the girl as a miracle, not a curse that would bury her, along with the Louisiana god I no longer know.
Survival
Always told I’d walk right into trouble, a big field and I’d be destined to find the one hole in the ground where I’d trip into some kind of hell. I was there again, caught up in not understanding how my dog’s breath had left her, body stiff, legs stuck straight up, a cartoon of a dog playing dead, and the shock of knowing stopped me in my tracks.
Something like a snake rustled away, the languid switch of terror in the wild grasses. Somewhere in the now of myself, seeing seized me, the cloud of nastiness swarming around her head, collecting in her open eyes, and I disappeared in dead dog dead dog, an emptiness
lifting me out of the scene. Finding me years later
as I handed out the quiz in first period: Ernie
who came to school stoned half the time—the moment turning me to him with my stack of papers and seeing in my face the gun the gun the gun and the stutter in my head, the words holding my body up, a dangling that fixed me in stone, my eyes lost to blinking.
Until something like a wire pulled me back and I said Ernie, give me the gun, as if it were the test he was bound to fail, falling back on fearlessness I’d learned to fake. Then like a magic trick, the weight of it was in my hand and I shoved it into my desk drawer. In 1970, I could push away my fear, refuse it, go on to the end of the school day when Ernie came in and I gave him back his gun.
Bluebird Elegy, for Louise
Back and forth the patterned swoop and dip, intent and low to the ground, his blue cutting the near-spring air, brief color in his wake. Lightness is his signature— he barely weighs one ounce, though
it’s a fragility he hardly knows, so exact he is, moving to her then away—watching from the top of the box that holds the feather-lined nest. She built it but he’s the main-stay, forager, catching everything it seems in mid-air. Always that true eye.
Together, they have dive-bombed the crows, battled the ever-crying house wrens, a brutal crew of them fighting to get in with their sticks and beaks.
But now days have passed and he doesn’t appear. Traversing the yard, tracing an overhead path back and forth, she will wait and watch, until one morning she herself will disappear. But this is how it happens: in one instant the intelligible world goes under, time breaking in half, defined only by absence.
No more his quiet attention to the world, that unassuming call you had to listen for.
