Maurice Manning

Well, this is nothing new, nothing to rattle the rafters in the noggin, this moment of remembering and its kissing cousin the waking dream. I wonder if I'll remember it? I've had a vision of a woman reclining underneath a tree: she's about half naked and little by little I'm sprinkling her burial mounds with grass. This is the kind of work I like. It lets me remember, and so I do. I remember the time I laid my homemade banjo in the fire and let it burn. There was nothing else to burn and the house was cold; the cigar box curled inside the flames. But the burst of heat was over soon, and once the little roar was done, I could hear the raindrops plopping up the buckets and kettles, scattered out like little ponds around the room. It was night and I was a boy, alone and left to listen to that old music. I liked it. I've liked it ever since. I loved the helpless people I loved. That's what a little boy will do, but a grown man will turn it all to sadness and let it soak his heart until he wrings it out and dreams about another kind of love, some afternoon beneath a tree. Burial mounds—that's hilarious.

You wouldn't have believed it, how the man, a little touched perhaps, set his hands together and prayed for happiness, yet not his own; he meant his people, by which he meant not people really, but trees and cows, the dirty horses, dogs, the fox who lived at the back of his place with her kits, and the very night who settled down to rock his place to sleep, the place he tried so hard to tend he found he mended fences in his sleep. He said to the you above, who, let's be honest, doesn't say too much, I need you now up there to give my people happiness, you let them smile and know the reason; hear my prayer, Old Yam. The you who's you might laugh at that, and I agree, it's funny to make a prayer like that, the down-home words and yonder reach of what he said; and calling God the Elder Sweet Potato, shucks, that's pretty funny, and kind of sad.