David Baker

What I wanted seemed little enough at the time. There was snow on the ground, grayish and sticking to the mud—the promise of plenty to come. Snow gathered already in the corners of sills. When she spoke what we had sensed for weeks without saying, her voice fell clear, unwavering, soft as the day. It hardly had to do with us anymore. The crazy tilt of the carport across the alley was all I could see for awhile, the weight on its wobbly roof like a terrible joke. But that was wrong—that was wrong. Before long the snows shook down on what we had done. What I wanted was to ignore it all, sit there in stillness, shepherding logs to the fire while the old ones went pink to white to gray.

It was midday before we noticed it was morning. The boy cousins brought us a tray—soup and cheese, warm soda, and a soft cloth and candy for her fever. They wouldn’t come in, the tray weighing between them. They stood like woodwork inside the door frame. By afternoon the old procession—silence at the lip of a dozen night travelers tired and grieving, one by one, or pairs floating to the bed and back with a touching of hands like humming, and the one we gathered for slipping farther for all the good we could do. She lay in her shadow. She looked to no one. Her daylilies bobbed wide open out in the wild, blue sun and the same bee kept nosing her window to reach them. Dusk: even the boys were back watching it try.

1. Footfalls on the brickwork road many fathers laid by hand and heavy mallet make a sandy sound. You can hear, in the dusted scuff, a kind of gasp as from the crumpled lungs of those bent double by depression, by wagonloads of work— you can hear huffs of hot wind kick the dust around them. You can feel the brickwork give. This is how the town found a way from starving. Three summers running: nothing but dust rained down to choke out cornfields and wheat. The council paid any man driven to his knees to lay a road from here to Cedar City to keep working. They tapped in bricks from the limekiln one season. They turned each one one-quarter twist the next. 2. All night, so far, I have waited for the train to come calling through a cotton curtain on its breeze. It always does—low as a mourning dove long minutes over the far, darkening fields and many trees. How huge the world must be to hear so far beyond the shade, beyond the grasp of night. There are apple boughs brushing my fine screen lightly. And a dozen stars, I know, like pinpricks on an arm. Before it stops, a train will hiss, grind, clatter all the way back while its car-locks bang. Then the engine at idle—hubbub, wood smoke, and trouble in the hobo camp below the trestle. How sad the world is to hear nothing for so long. It always comes. Sweet night wind like cider. 3. I was watching the road where his car went and thirty years burned off, as in a drop of oil. I was scanning for dust on the rise, a cartoon cowboy’s gallop. It’s where he drove each morning off to work somewhere hard with the road crew— he returned each evening, burned and hurt. I have a good life and hands too soft for labor. Who would guess it takes this long to come home? All week I have checked the old road, as if nothing had come to pass—jars of peaches pinging on the kitchen sill, her voice like silverware. I was playing with a soldier and blue truck. There’s a road to everywhere, the song sweeps on. I am watching the road where the car drove. 4. You can feel the brickwork give beneath your step. Each such shift in sand and balanced earth is kindred to the world’s intrinsic drift. Cars kick up a clatter, rumbling down the road— their tires grind brick to brick, turn dust to dust. When a truck goes by, the whole street quakes. You can feel your life begin to shake. 5. Hanging primrose breeze. Haze of barbeque. The many children quieted by baths, put to bed— they wait for the locusts’ buzz and homing trains. One lone bat recurrent in the streetlamp glow. Four blocks down the road gives way to asphalt blacktop. But here the block stamp macon brick hasn’t rubbed off the red clay bars the many fathers wrecked their knees to pack tightly back into earth. How small a world it is to want such work. I will come here only once more to lie down too, having lived to praise one thing made so well it sings with each slow passage, rimmed with sleepers safe in all their loved and many beds. Flowers line every sidewalk down the breathing road.

The sun is warm, the sky is clear, etc.... Quickly he taps a full nib twice to the mouth of his japan-ink bowl—harder than he had thought, if he had thought—smears the fine spattering with his sleeve, and continues, for whom haste is more purity than certainty, as anarchy is better than despotism— for this reason—that the former is for a season & that the latter is eternal.

A short ride in the van, then the eight of us there in the heat—white shirtsleeves sticking, the women’s gloves off—fanning our faces. The workers had set up a big blue tent to help us at graveside tolerate the sun, which was brutal all afternoon as if stationed above us, though it moved limb to limb through two huge, covering elms. The long processional of neighbors, friends, the town’s elderly, her beauty-shop patrons, her club’s notables. . . The world is full of prayers arrived at from afterwards, he said. Look up through the trees—the hands, the leaves curled as in self-control or quietly hurting, or now open, flat-palmed, many-fine-veined, and whether from heat or sadness, waving.

1. Then the long fencerow, that years ago had heaved and buckled, took on a copper shine in the sunset, the dew. A garlic haze of cut pastures simmered fields away. 2. They were flushed from sex—they were traced with that other body, just parted. They stood in the length of first fall waiting. And their skin, that had been so willing, 3. delible as ash to a trembling fingertip, became its own again. One star, three. Nothing good was going to happen. Night winds lifted themselves out of wheat rows and shook 4. off what had been done. So they turned elsewhere. Her fingers gathered up her collar softly in a bunch, and she put on a scarf. It was not even cold. It was only cool.