Messenger

We shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed. Two nights he came to me, mute, on fire, no dream. I woke to find the window embered and fog filling the willows. The third time he was milder and early, his gray form all ash. He said to me at bedside, kneeling, “You must say your life to save it.” Midnight, hoarfrost. I was not yet ten and didn’t know what to make of so brief a bedtime story. His features were simple and familiar—the smile, both eyes shut in bliss, I guessed, head and torso echoing an antique keyhole. From sleep’s icy edge I asked, “How?” But he was gone, the room all hazed. The air smelled of struck matches, scuppernong, a copperhead’s musk. What next? The moon was new in the budding bird cherry and Venus startling overhead. Dizzy for water, I followed my flashlight down the stairs where the black mantel clock was bonging. Beside it sat the twin of my herald, a stone bookend from Kildare and no more able to speak or take wing than a weathercock. His closed eyes told me, “Look inside,” but I ached to see him blaze again and say aloud how change could shake me to a shining. “But I must be the key,” I thought, and stepped over the sparkling threshold. My nightshirt floated ghostly across the scalded lawn, under the arbor, beside the barn, my soles not troubled by white grass crackling all the way to the well shed, the burning that must have been coming from me.