Neal Bowers

Lately, the weather aches; the air is short of breath, and morning stumbles in, stiff-jointed. Day by day, the sun bores the sky, until the moon begins its tiresome disappearing act, making the oceans yawn. Even the seasons change with a throb of weariness— bud, bloom, leaf, fall. If it would help, I would paint my house silver or sell it or buy a red convertible. I would, but who am I to try to cheer up the self-indulgent universe.

(Detroit, 1950) Because the jobs were there and a man could get rich working on the line, the South retreated North to Michigan, whole families eating crackers and baloney by the side of the road, changing drivers to keep moving through corn fields and foreign towns, sundown and darkness, the moon a prophecy of chrome, the stars 10 million headlights of the cars they would build. Ahead lay a city bright with steel; behind, the dark fields folded over everything they knew; and when they dozed on cramped back seats, they dreamed such dreams as the road can make, of drifting on a lake or stream or lying down in hay to dream of traveling, so that when they woke to a bump, a couch, a voice saying, “It’s your turn,” they were lost to themselves and took a few moments to remember their names. Mostly behind their backs, the locals called them rednecks, crackers, goddamned rebs. Strange to be strange, in their new neighborhoods, to be ethnic with a thick accent and a taste for food the grocers didn’t stock— hog jowl and blackeyes, turnip greens, roasting ears, souse-meat— the butcher shrugging, the produce man shaking his head. Sometimes their own voices took them by surprise, sounding odd and out of place in the din of a city bus, ringing lost in the evening air when they called their children in for supper. At work they touched parts of tomorrow, next year’s models always taking shape and vanishing, the present obsolete, the past merely a rumor, all hours blurring into one continuous moment of finishing a fragment, each piece the same piece, movements identical, endless, like a punishment in hell. No way out but back to their old lives, a future they already knew by heart, a few on the road each month in cars they may have helped assemble, tokens of their failed success, legacies for boys to find years later rusting on some lot, banged up but still a dream and fast enough when overhauled to make them feel they could blast straight into tomorrow, as they raced their engines at each stoplight and cruised their towns in circles.

I hate your hills white with dogwood or pink with redbud in spring as if you invented hope, as if in the middle of red clay, limestone outcroppings, and oak trees dead with fungus something slight and beautiful should make us smile. I hate the way honeysuckle drapes fences, blooms in the ditch where everyone dumps garbage; the evening air sweet with cedar and fields of burley; the way irises and buttercups mark the old dimensions of a house destroyed a hundred years ago; how a span of Queen Anne’s lace rocks the whole moon, and the sumac runs dark against the hill. I hate the drawl, the lazy voice saying I’ve been away so long I sound like I’m from nowhere; the old hand gathering snowballs or peonies or forking up an extra dish of greens, bitter, just the way I like them.

Sent in after new ground was taken, my father ducked from ditch to shell-hole, unwinding the telephone cable behind him, a pfc. cast as Mercury, connecting the gods with the lesser gods. Funny to think of him trailing the complex filament of speech, that man, neither shy nor sullen, who answered only “Yes,” “No,” “Maybe,” and never volunteered a private thought. Standing off with his hands in his pockets or cupping a cigarette, he seemed to be waiting with the great rural patience of fields for whatever might rise pure and nameless or fall from the sky beyond explanation. If anyone asked what he was thinking, he said, “Nothing,” and when he died he rushed out leaving everything unsaid, uncoiling a dark line into darkness down which a familiar silence roars.