Robert Wrigley

The birdhouse made from a gourd is wired to a flanged loop of steel and screwed to the southeast post of the shack. Two holes at the top—near where the stem was, for a thong of leather to hang it by, which long ago broke— are now the fingerholes of the mournful wind instrument it’s become. The broad round bowl of it makes a sort of birdly basso profundo that pearls through the steel, into the post, the floor joists and walls in two notes: a slightly sharp D and an equally sharp F, says the guitar tuner, which explains why all my thinking these days is in B-flat, a difficult key for all but the clarinet and this sudden covey of nuthatches, whose collective woe makes it a minor chord I am in the middle of. Nothing to do but hoist such silks as the luff of limbs and needles suggests, and sail on, the barely-escaped-from-the-cat chipmunk chattering like a gull, and the mountain’s last drift of snow resembling the back of a sounding whale. Hear the thrum of the rigging, Daggoo? Hear its profoundest woo, its sensible gobbledy-goo and doo-wop, the boo-hoos of the spheres, by vectors and veers, by tacks and refractal jabberings, taking us deeper into the weirdness of the ghost sea those prairie hills were the bottom of once, this nowhere we shall not be returning from. Draw the lines! Assume the crow’s nest, Pip. This ship sails on music and wind, and away with birds.

Sleepy and suburban at dusk, I learn again the yard’s geometry, edging around the garden and the weedy knots of flowers, circling trees and shrubs, giving a wide berth to the berry patch, heavy and sprawled out of its bounds. Shoving such a machine around a fairway of dandelions, it is easy to feel absurd. The average lawn, left alone one hundred years, could become a hardwood forest. An admirable project. Still I carry on, following week on week the same mowing pattern, cutting edges, almost sprinting the last narrow swaths. And tonight, as I mow over the bushels of fallen peaches, sending pits soaring over the neighbors’ fences, seems hardly any different. But on one crooked march I walk across the thin hidden hole to a yellowjacket hive. The blade pulls them up from their deep sweet chamber just as my bare legs go by. A bee lands heavily, all blunder and revenge, and the sting is a quick embrace and release, like the dared kid’s run and touch of a blind man. I’m blind now with the shock and pain of it, howling in a sprint toward the house, the mower flopped on its side, wild blade loose in the darkening air. Later, the motor sputtered quiet, starved by tilt, I’m back in the twilight, a half-dozen stings packed in wet tobacco, carrying a can of gasoline, a five-foot torch. The destruction is easy: shove can slow to entranceway lip, pull back and light torch, use torch to tip can. One low whump and it’s over. A few flaming drones flutter out and fall. Stragglers, late returners, cruise wide circles around the ruins. In the cool September night they fly or die. In the morning I finish my chores. All the way to winter the blackened hole remains. On Christmas Eve a light late snow covers it and all the lawn’s other imperfections: crabgrass hummocks, high maple roots, the mushroom-laden fairy ring that defies obliteration and appears every spring more visible than ever. Standing in the window, the scent of pine powerful around me, the snap of wood undoing itself in the stove, I wonder at this thin and cold camouflage, falling, gradually falling over what has gone and grown before. And I hear that other rattle and report, that engine driven by another fire. I think of a gold that is sweet and unguent, a gold that is a blaze of years behind me. I hear wind in its regular passes blowing across the roof, feel in my legs a minute and icy tingling, as though I have stood too long in one place or made again another wrong step, as though the present itself were a kind of memory, coiled, waiting, dying to be seen from tomorrow.

Called out of dream by the pitch and screech, I awoke to see my mother’s hair set free of its pincurls, springing out into the still and hurtling air above the front seat and just as suddenly gone. The space around us twisted, and in the instant before the crash I heard the bubbling of the chickens, the homely racket they make at all speeds, signifying calm, resignation, oblivion. And I listened. All through the slash and clatter, the rake of steel, shatter of glass, I listened, and what came was a blizzard moan in the wind, a wail of wreckage, severed hoses and lives, a storm of loose feathers, and in the final whirl approximating calm, the cluck and fracas of the birds. I crawled on hands and knees where a window should have been and rose uneven in November dusk. Wind blew a snow of down, and rows of it quivered along the shoulder. One thin stream of blood oozed, flocked in feathers. This was in the Ozarks, on a road curving miles around Missouri, and as far as I could see, no light flickered through the timber, no mail box leaned the flag of itself toward pavement, no cars seemed ever likely to come along. So I walked, circled the darkening disaster my life had come to, and cried. I cried for my family there, knotted in the snarl of metal and glass; for the farmer, looking dead, half in and half out of his windshield; and for myself, ambling barefoot through the jeweled debris, glass slitting little blood-stars in my soles, my arm hung loose at the elbow and whispering its prophecies of pain. Around and around the tilted car and the steaming truck, around the heap of exploded crates, the smears and small hunks of chicken and straw. Through an hour of loneliness and fear I walked, in the almost black of Ozark night, the moon just now burning into Missouri. Behind me, the chickens followed my lead, some fully upright, pecking the dim pavement for suet or seed, some half-hobbled by their wounds, worthless wings fluttering in the effort. The faintest light turned their feathers phosphorescent, and as I watched they came on, as though they believed me some savior, some highwayman or commando come to save them the last night of their clucking lives. This, they must have believed, was the end they’d always heard of, this the rendering more efficient than the axe, the execution more anonymous than a wringing arm. I walked on, no longer crying, and soon the amiable and distracted chattering came again, a sound like chuckling, or the backward suck of hard laughter. And we walked to the cadence their clucking called, a small boy towing a cloud around a scene of death, coming round and round like a dream, or a mountain road, like a pincurl, like pulse, like life.

As a hoodoo-voodoo, get-you-back-to-me tool, this hank’s thankless task is vast, a head down to the ground impossibility, possibly, since what I’m thinking of is your toe pad pinknesses too, your soup hots and round-and-rounds, the fine and perfect poundage of you on my paws, the very cause and problem I moan and bemoan the absence of. For Love, above the head this reddish coil once lavishly wore, there’s an air so far away it’s sad for me to even think the same sun’s rays play where it was and do to you what I would do if I were there or you were here. Still, some thrills remembered do resemble thrills, one hopes, and the ropes of it that gently fell around me bound me so well no hell of miles can defile this dream I dream. I mean the anyway DNA I can find of you. I mean the home of bones and blood that holds the whole of you and which this fizzed-up missive means to conjure, missy, my world in a curl, girl, this man oh man half man I am when you’re gone.

Of the two spoiled, barn-sour geldings we owned that year, it was Red— skittish and prone to explode even at fourteen years—who’d let me hold to my face his own: the massive labyrinthine caverns of the nostrils, the broad plain up the head to the eyes. He’d let me stroke his coarse chin whiskers and take his soft meaty underlip in my hands, press my man’s carnivorous kiss to his grass-nipping upper half of one, just so that I could smell the long way his breath had come from the rain and the sun, the lungs and the heart, from a world that meant no harm.

About the only thing I thought I knew was that nothing I’d ever know would do any good. Sunrise, say, or that the part of the horse’s hoof that most resembles a human palm is called the frog; certain chords on the guitar of no mercantile use; the abstruse circuitry of an envelope quatrain; even the meaning of horripilation. Sometimes on a flatland mound the ancients had made, I took heart in the pointlessness of stars and lay there until my teeth chattered. I earned my last Boy Scout merit badge building a birdhouse out of license plates manufactured by felons in the big house. No more paramilitary organizations for me, I said, ten years before I was drafted. I had skills. Sure-footedness and slick fielding. Eventually I would learn to unhook a bra one-handed, practicing on my friend, his sister's worn over his T-shirt (I took my turns too). One Easter Sunday I hid through the church service among the pipes of the organ and still did not have faith, although my ears rang until Monday. I began to know that little worth knowing was knowable and faith was delusion. I began to believe I believed in believing nothing I was supposed to believe in, except the stars, which, like me, were not significant, except for their light, meaning I loved them for their pointlessness. I believed I owned them somehow. A C major 7th chord was beautiful and almost rare. The horse I loved foundered and had to be put down. The middle rhyme in an envelope quatrain was not imprisoned if it was right. In cold air a nipple horripilates and rises, the sun comes up and up and up, a star that bakes the eggs in a Boy Scout license plate birdhouse. God was in music and music was God. A drill sergeant seized me by my dog tag chain and threatened to beat me to a pile of bloody guts for the peace sign I’d chiseled in the first of my two tags, the one he said they’d leave in my mouth before they zipped the body bag closed. Yet one more thing I’d come to know. He also said that Uncle Sam owned my ass, no more true than my ownership of the stars. I can play a C major 7th chord in five or six places on the neck of a guitar. A stabled horse’s frog degrades; a wild horse’s becomes a callus, smooth as leather. Stars are invisible in rainy weather, something any fool knows, of course.

Under dust plush as a moth’s wing, the book’s leather cover still darkly shone, and everywhere else but this spot was sodden beneath the roof’s unraveling shingles. There was that back-of-the-neck lick of chill and then, from my index finger, the book opened like a blasted bird.   In its box of familiar and miraculous inks, a construction of filaments and dust, thoroughfares of worms, and a silage of silverfish husks:   in the autumn light, eight hundred pages of perfect wordless lace.

The Afterlife 1 Spring, and the first full crop of dandelions gone to smoke, the lawn lumpish with goldfinches, hunched in their fluffs, fattened by seed, alight in the wind-bared peduncular forest. Little bells, they loop and dive, bend the delicate birch branches down. I would enter the sky through the soil myself, sing up the snail bowers and go on the lam with the roots. Licked by filaments, I would lie, a billion love-mouths to suckle and feed. Where the river will be next week, a puddle two trout go savagely dying in. Notice the bland, Darwinian sand: bone wrack and tree skin, the ground down moon bowls of mussels, viral stones dividing like mold. At twelve, I buried the frog because it was dead and dug it up because I'd been dreaming— a fish belly light, a lowly chirruped chorus of amens. I thought my nights might smell of hell. Bland, hum-drum, quotidian guilt— if I've killed one frog, I've killed two. Saint Rot and the sacraments of maggots: knowing is humus and sustenance is sex. It accrues and accrues, it stews tumorous with delight. Tomorrow's a shovelful, the spit of the cosmos, one day the baby's breath is no longer a rose.

Lucy Doolin, first day on the job, stroked his goatee and informed the seven of us in his charge his name was short for Lucifer, and that his father, a man he never knew, had been possessed, as his mother had told him, of both an odd sense of humor and a deep and immitigable bitterness. Also that the same man had named Lucy’s twin brother, born dead, Jesus Christ. These facts, he said, along with his tattoos and Mohawked black hair, we should, in our toils on his behalf, remember. As we should also always remember to call him only by that otherwise most womanly diminutive, and never, he warned, by his given nor surname, least of all with the title “Mister” attached, which would remind him of that same most hated father and plunge him therefore into a mood he could not promise he would, he said, “behave appropriately within.” Fortunately, our job, unlike the social difficulties attached thereto, was simple: collect the trash from the county’s back roads. Although, given Lucy’s insistence on thoroughness, this meant not only beer cans and bottles, all manner of cast-off paper and plastics, but also the occasional condom too, as well as the festering roadkill fresh and ridden with maggotry, or desiccate and liftable only from the hot summer tar with a square-bladed shovel, all of which was to be tossed into the bed of the township flatbed truck we ourselves rode to and from the job in. By fifty-yard increments then we traveled. He was never not smoking a cigarette. Late every afternoon, at the dump, while we unloaded our tonnage of trash, he sat with Stump McCarriston, sexton of the dump and the dump’s constant resident, in the shade, next to a green, decrepit trailer we marveled at and strangely envied, since every inch of wall we could see through the open door was plastered with fold-outs and pages from every Stump-salvaged Playboy and nudie magazine he had ever found among the wreckage there. Stump, we understood, was the ugliest man on earth. Even had Lucy not told us so, we would have known, by the olfactory rudeness within twenty yards of his hovel, that he never bathed. And once, while we shoveled and scraped, he took up the .22 from the rack beside his door and popped with amazing accuracy three rats not fifty feet from us, then walked to their carcasses, skinned them out, and hung their hides on a scavenged grocery store rack to dry. He was making, Lucy explained, a rat hide coat we could see, come the fall, except for school. As for school, it was a concept Stump could not fathom and Lucy had no use for, on the truck’s dash all that summer Robert Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy, a tome he said he’d read already eleven times, this summer being the twelfth. We thought, in some way, it might have had to do with something like the gallery Stump’s trailer contained, the first word of its title meaning something to us, the last nothing at all. There were things about men we might be unable ever to know, which we somehow knew was lucky. And Lucky, incidentally, was the name of the cat, fat and mangy, that, once Stump was back in the shade with Lucy, began, one by one, to consume the hideless rats. The town we came from was sinking into the emptiness of a thousand abandoned coal mine shafts beneath it, and rats were more common than hares and universally despised. They shamed us, it seemed, as we were shamed by ignorance and curiosity— the bodies of those women on the walls, the provenance of rats the very earth offered up like a plague, the burden of a name like Lucifer or Stump, whose name, as it was scrawled on his mailbox, seemed to be Stumplin Reilly McCarriston, Esquire. Of the seven of us, one would die in Vietnam, one, after medical school, would hang himself from a beam in his parents’ basement, the others merely gone, vanished in actuality if not in memory. Leaving me, alone, to tell this story. How Stump would spend his last twenty years in prison, having shot Lucy—one slender, flattening .22 slug through the forehead—as he stood fifty feet away, balanced atop the tub of an ancient wringer washer, arms extended, like Jesus Christ, said Stump, whose trailer was bulldozed into the dump itself even before the trial, and who, no doubt, by some court-appointed lawyer if not the appalled sheriff himself, was forced to bathe and shave, to step into the unknown country of a scentless white shirt and black businessman’s trousers, in order to offer his only yet most sincere defense, that Lucifer—Mr. Doolin, as the court insisted—had told him to.

Because I have come to the fence at night, the horses arrive also from their ancient stable. They let me stroke their long faces, and I note in the light of the now-merging moon how they, a Morgan and a Quarter, have been by shake-guttered raindrops spotted around their rumps and thus made Appaloosas, the ancestral horses of this place. Maybe because it is night, they are nervous, or maybe because they too sense what they have become, they seem to be waiting for me to say something to whatever ancient spirits might still abide here, that they might awaken from this strange dream, in which there are fences and stables and a man who doesn’t know a single word they understand.