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Storytelling at the Res He’s a good guy now but by jollies Joe was no good one time like he’d steal his own wife’s hairlong jewelry to pay off a deal Outside the rain came steady I had to smile hairlong If you need a drink or drug believe me you take what you got to take Joe went on Go ahead and rob your buddies or your very own folks So warm inside I could almost doze I felt faint
Was a time Joe worked a big saw the whole while plastered a wonder he never got himself or somebody wasted A lot of days like that and in and out and in and out of the joint Joe wore a raven feather in his hat and he talked about the feather wanted to joke about it It meant he got better It ain’t no warbonnet He tried to get humble was what he was saying
Just the one feather in it Anybody else got something he kept on asking Everybody would nod and then most looked shy and said nothing Jesse wore braids and he had half an arm missing He spoke up to say he was out again for a while from prison Bunch of other people not here Joe said some clean and sober for years they disappear then they’re locked up or dead
What about you he looked at me what do you got I kept quiet No no don’t nobody feel on the spot said Joe He was just a guy himself with some habits too Check out this gut too many doughnuts But they don’t make you lose it I wanted to say it We’ve all been crazy once I thought You got something more Jesse let’s hear about it Joe said Once you put stuff right out in the open
you get it out of your system You start in with that then maybe you heal it Jesse said I don’t even got no hat never mind some bonnet Joe said that’s God’s will So when I chopped off my arm at the mill that was God at work on the res? Jesse said and smiled Joe knew he didn’t mean it Joe said what happens whatever it is there’s a reason Look around at us all
I looked down at the floor We’re supposed to be where we’re at it’s just a God deal even when our asses get throwed in stir I thought it could be right what he said which was we went to different schools but we all went together I wanted a story a knockout like Joe’s Maybe I wasn’t better I had to be crazy or just a fool The blue tattoo on Jesse’s stub showed only the top halves of letters
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Dirt and Blossom Earl and Cyrus, two old-time woodsmen, told me How they came upon him in the Fifth Lake country Not far from where their camp stood back in those days. Smack in the middle of nowhere at all. Neither could figure how he came to be killed,
No blood, no mark on his body or face. Some claim it was never found out just who he was. I’d bet the authorities did learn his name, But that’s not the point. It’s not the part that sticks. What I best remember went something like this:
The brothers were hunting, and never mind it was May. “This was Depression times,” said Cy, “And if we couldn’t use the fish and deer, We'd’ve died as sure as drinking poison.” So no, they didn't bide their time till season
But shot and netted their food all year. On the day they spoke of, the rain began to pour Down hard, and they took for a thicket of pine Where limbs wove up so tight they about made a roof. The brothers pushed inside and scooched
Right on the ground and kept pretty dry till one -- Earl, I think -- looked out on a man. No, not a man. Only a man's bare heel, Which glowed in bolt-lightning. The two of them knew Of course there had to be a body too.
They couldn't see it: whenever it fell, It dropped right over the bank, that bone-white heel The one thing showing. They didn't speak A word for a while, but each of the hunters could tell What the other must be thinking as well.
I don’t have to say that neither one of them liked The idea of what they’d see on that bank When time arrived that they’d plain have to see. They couldn't come up with any cause To be quick about it, though. Whoever he was,
Whatever was left of him next to that stream, Wouldn’t be in any hurry himself. They agreed To leave the poor devil resting right there Until they could puzzle out what on earth to do. Those two brothers are long dead too,
and what they told me they did at last is a blur. I do know they noticed a tree when it faired, A pear, of all things, unheard of in such a place. They reckoned it out that -- long before humans, White or tribe-folk, men or women,
Were ever so much as supposed to exist In a godforsaken, backcountry corner like this -- Someone had made a house here, a dooryard. There was still some ice along that small brook's sides Where it ran in the darkness under shade,
And it chilled their souls, as their story chilled me. That hard Gully-washer had splattered mud On the man, but pear flowers too, which they took for snow At first. He lay naked except for that, And the dirt-and-blossom trousers, the mask and cap:
They wouldn’t make much difference to anyone now.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Hum and Click The puppy softly whined in dream -- as if she heard that subtle clicking mixed with a hum, which seemed to come from some electric device -- then she quieted. Inertia of summer’s night had settled
on him as well, soft as bed linen. How often he’d stood at a window, shining a flashlight outdoors, but never determined the source of that sound, so odd and confounding. After so many failures, he barely pulled
himself again from mattress to floor and down the bowed-in upstairs hall to see what little he would. The song, to call it that, rose out of the rough, abandoned field uphill from the house.
I need to know what it is for certain, he thought. He might: the moon gleamed full, and he was only 27. In the shine, at last, miraculous: a hen whippoorwill who picked at gravel
while the cock, in full strut with tail upthrust, hummed and clicked a small bird’s version of immemorial courtship rites common to all us earthly creatures. How pretty she was, his sleeping wife....
And tomorrow, he reckoned, I’ll know forever something I didn’t know tonight. Succeeding owners all renovate parts of the house, on which that evening moon dropped softly, however bright.
He’s years along in more lasting marriage. Some of his children now have children. He’s owned just under a dozen dogs since he heard the whine from that puppy pointer at whippoorwills, which hereabouts
have grown so rare he’d almost surrender years of his life just to hear one now.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Mannish Boy He’s imagined, or prayed at least, he had the power to live at some mystic level. Out of nowhere just now he recalls the Muddy Waters blues band playing The Showboat. Just one of a crowd, still he felt that he might have written
“Long Distance Call,” for instance, by way of some magical gift come down from his stars. He knew Muddy’s licks on guitar, James Cotton’s on harp -- he always had -- by heart. Just to be tuned in like that,
he believed as a kid, should show the world what he was. You can be that full of crap when you’re so young, he thinks. You leave it behind as a man, he hopes. He hoped that Muddy would somehow honor this beer-brave white boy
who was versed in all his songs, by title, lyric, even recording session. He had something at least that belonged to him, though he wouldn’t sing and couldn’t play. No matter, he figured there must
be some reward for devotion. The bluesman would see a chance in the break to acknowledge his spirit’s kin. The kid had watched his hero and himself with an inward eye: they were sharing a laugh, and he’d be a hero as well
to someone out there, at least by association. ...........The vision would soon enough pale, and not for the first or last time. Muddy had closed his set with “Mannish Boy,”
and it looked like he had it in mind to be that now. He was sounding some handsome young lady in a corner. The kid would settle for one of his sidemen, an older man in brogans and an age-sheened double-breaster,
who’d crudely painted an oversized owl on his drum. The kid, these many years later, alone on his porch, feels the Arctic blow into his soul, and he knows it isn’t weather that makes him shiver. It’s memory’s long distance call.
He was full of utopian dreams back then in the Sixties. He winces at his own old question: what did the painting mean? Close by -- who-who? -- an owl starts up as if prompted. How different is life today?
How different from then at The Showboat when he expected.... Some colorful Delta adventure? Some discourse on Yoruba myth? The chill in his bowels assures him again that his nature is far from star-crossed. He is what he is, unchanged.
He can’t even believe in himself. The sideman questioned him back: “Son, you blind, or is you only lame-brain?” The kid may look like a man, but he’s awkward as ever. “What I painted on my skins,”
is a owl,” said Muddy’s drummer.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Unnaming How often he has seen this butterfly, but he looks it up today on his way to seventy. Perhaps he needs a hobby, however depressing the notion. The yellowed book says the bug’s named Io.
All his companions are dropping like flies. Oh, damn the winter, he complains again to himself as cold rain hammers his metal roof. It’s not a butterfly. Colorful North American moth,
see plate 32. He does and remembers the story of Io. Or tries. She was, he thinks, a victim of Zeus’s predation, but there were so many he can’t count them. Rape’s bad enough. Why make her
into a cow? Then Hera tied her.... Who on earth cares? Why look up the rest when all its details would quickly disperse? into smidgens and shards he knows he’d never regather, whatever he might rediscover?
All is dispersal. Childhood best friend John has lately dropped dead on a trail, his snowshoes a snarl; it turns out Willie’s heart was infarcted, the marathon runner now the moldered corpse.
He knows this bitter chill of course won’t endure, yet he savors despondence -- no matter that fields are covered in bluets and so appear to be dressed in snow, nor that Io came back a day ago.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Teacher at Cloudland Falls Sunlit in April afternoon, far down in the valley, ribbons of green -- first green that Frost called gold, and said it can’t stay. To reward his climb, the cascade jets mist that’s coruscant with silver.
He thinks of Eddie, son of a farmer, how two storeys up in a gilded mow they wrestled together a haybale fort. Dust motes -- much like these droplets now -- flitted in angular beams of light
that poured from the barn’s one roofline window down to its buckled floorboards. Smoke glided through the beams as well, having billowed out the door-hole they’d left so they could peek at invented foes. Their cigarettes
came from a pack of those weird Kool straights: at the unlit ends, fat rings of brown like filters -- which had not yet been discovered. Whom did they steal their contraband from? What difference? The two boys hacked and whispered,
unaccountably joyful. Doubtless the sun’s pyrotechnics prompt these recollections. He shivers, imagines conflagration. How did they live out those foolhardy hours? The teacher wonders if Eddie’s grown
as responsible as he is himself these days: he’ll carry out every scrap of his waste, paper, plastic, even apple cores. There’s still some snow on the northward-facing flank of this northern New Hampshire trail.
The cool from its surface, he thinks, is a blessing, like that smoky spray from the waterfall. He last saw Eddie back fifty-some years. In that golden hayloft, they might have died. Now the farm is as gone as those unheeding boys,
which in itself feels enough for tears. He stands on high, the waters roar. They might have died, but they did taste joy. How will he teach his class tomorrow at the venerable, ivy-garlanded college,
if he can’t distinguish regret from knowledge, accountability from sorrow?
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