My Father Should Die in Winter

Not because winter kills

all things that cast a shadow.

Not because its wind

so wounds the trees

they stand naked

in their sorrow.

Neither because the world loses color

as he loses words, nor because

home is pared to the face

of a fireplace, the way rooms

shrink after winter storms

to circles made of candlelight.

My father and I

sit before the television

and watch each other.

I try to avoid what his eyes

ask of my hands.

I have spent a lifetime

believing a word would warm

the air between us.

Now I know better.

I know my best words are

like leaves too strong

to fall until the last wind.

They will be trapped

all winter

in prisons of ice,

staring at the sun.

Buck Creek      Winter, 1937

It was a wolf winter, their bellies so empty they felt their bones sag and feared they’d cave like the swaybacked barn that ramshackled apart at first snow. So the father handed his eldest his old thirty-ought six and the boy his warmest woolen scarf, then shouldered the new rifle as they left before dawn. The snow was painfully bright even at that hour and made that sound, somewhere between a crunch and a groan, only snow can call out when the foot tamps it down. They crossed the tobacco field, into the woods. By first light they were over the ridge and were it not known land, their land, they would be lost without road or rock to mark their way, just trees lined up like some silent army waiting for a forgotten command. The boy kept lagging behind, but the father was patient and said nothing as he slowed or even backtracked. The first born never even looked back, just kept walking and straining to find a track, scat, a gnawed bit of bark, anything that might mean game or danger. It was as the father was catching up, saying they had to slow down, that they heard the boy cry out and the growl of the awakened bear, moving faster than such a burdensome mass of fat and fur should be able as it barreled up the slope with the boy in its sights and the father swung around, yanking the new rifle to his shoulder but the shot went wide and the bear was on the boy before he could get off a second to save his only son. That was when his daughter raised the old rifle and put a round square in the bear’s heart, the bullet passing so close to the boy that his ear hurt from the rush of cold air. And when they pulled the bear’s dead bulk off the boy he was crying and clung to his father like he hadn’t since he learned to walk. And the eldest, pushing a lock of her blonde hair over her ear, leaned over the bear wondering if its winter-starved haunches would yield enough meat to last them.

Castello di Postignano

Every summer your great grandma

made us climb halfway into

the Carolina blue sky

to look for blueberries on Satulah,

a Cherokee word I think means

mountain where everything

grows but blueberries.

She found berries there once.

So she kept trying, defying logic

and the definition of insanity.

Which might explain why

I’m at another writing retreat,

this time at a castle, a real one,

learning again to show, not tell.

It’s the last night,

my bags are by the door.

I’m climbing the tower

to look for constellations,

though we both know I do better

stringing lights between fireflies.

I’m trying to reach you one more time.

I want to tell you how

the workmen here found frescoes

behind a wall that collapsed,

a sort of architectural pentimento.

I want to show you how

the colors never faded.

I want you to know I will look

for you in the stars as I look for

you at the stars.

I will write you

though I cannot write you

back into this world.

In the beginning, shards of light

spilled across the night sky,

some too beautiful to become stars.

I will look for them behind the darkness.

Buck Creek      Spring, 1938

Everything about it was wrong and there was no way a father could make it right. Not this time. It was spring, when things are supposed to spring to life. The fields and woods and bellies full of life. Full the way he was when he first married her mother, those nights when he took her to bed so full he thought he would burst at the seams until he spilled out into her. Like the way her belly filled with the two they brought into the world, filled out and stretched until he thought he could see their faces pressing against his wife’s taut flesh, straining to get out, more like a bird fighting its way out of the shell than a human baby. Especially his daughter, his firstborn, so full of life and so fed up with waiting she kicked and rolled until his wife swore she was either twins or some sort of Goliath and then there she was, shockingly frail, shockingly female, but her eyes wide open, looking about the room although the midwife, laughing, swore newborns couldn’t see anything. Full of life from that first moment, and ready to take it on. Not like the boy, cut from his mother because he wasn’t ready to be born and then screaming, eyes shut, red-faced, never quite ready to face up to life. Book-loving. Gentle. More like his mother and loved for it. He was the one you feared would fall through the ice in March, step onto a satinback in August, inhale the poison breath of a witch virus or the chill of some newly-named haint resistant to poultice and pill. He was the one to worry over, the one to pray for, not the daughter. And it was the daughter who, that last cold night of the bad winter, took a chill and stopped living. The preacher told him the law said she had to be laid to rest in a proper place and that the churchyard was best for all, but the father knew better. She was not going into some hole the hired man would dig in the manicured grass behind that very church she schemed and plotted to avoid each Sunday, her excuses becoming so creative even her mother laughed and gave in. These were the woods she loved, and if her father’s hands could not build her a home or raise a barn for her and the husband she would never know, he could right well make her a place in the earth. And he did. Walking back, his chest feeling at once too heavy to bear and hollow as a long-dead chestnut, he looked to the sky and wondered how long before its empty blue mouth inhaled the part of him he struggled to carry home.

Let Me Show You What Every Boy Should Know about His Gran’pa’s Timex

It really should be gold, shouldn’t it?

A gold pocket watch with a hunter’s case,

a photo of your grandmother inside.

Then again, this wristwatch is more appropriate.

Gran’pa isn’t the pocketwatch sort.

Takes a lickin’

and keeps on tickin’

That was the commercial when I was your age.

They’d strap one to a diver and show him

doing a swan dive off a cliff.

When he climbed out

they’d focus the camera

on the watch,

dripping wet but

still be ticking the seconds.

Tick.

Tick.

Tick.

Have you ever heard a wristwatch

make that sound?

Let’s get the glass off first.

It’s called a crystal.

I don’t know, maybe once

they were made of crystal.

This little crack means it must be replaced.

Look through it. It’s clear

and a mirror at the same time.

When the light is right, you can see me,

with your reflection alongside.

I saw Gran’Pa that way.

Look it in the face.

Don’t touch the hands.

Naked, they are so frail.

Now let’s flip it over

and take a look.

This back panel is so old it’s worn smooth.

Sweat, the body’s acid, does that.

Never said anything anyway, except maybe

that it was waterproof, shockproof and

made in someplace they buy time low, sell high.

There, that’s the mainspring.

Main.

Spring.

This is what brings the watch to life.

It’s the driving force.

If the mainspring is strong,

a watch like this will last long.

Long after it’s out of style, after

it’s a creaky old thing

with a cracked crystal.

And next to it, the going train.

It’s a gear train.

Trains move things, right?

The going train transmits the mainspring’s force

but that would be worthless without this.

The balance wheel.

Everything stays uniform because of

the balance wheel.

A second lasts a second,

a minute lasts 60 seconds.

You can be sure of it.

Every time.

Reliable.

Certain.

Balanced.

And all of it would be useless

were it not for this.

Know what it is?

The escapement.

The escapement allows the energy

to get out of the box of springs

and wheels and gears

to move those frail little hands.

It doesn’t matter how good the mechanism,

if all that good stuff stays inside.

Let’s put it all back together and take it

to show Gran’pa when we visit.

Maybe he will say something.

Maybe he will smile.

He would have liked to know you better.

but time sort of caught up with him.

One more thing. You’ll see all kinds of stuff

on watches: timers and time zones, date-keepers

and every kind of upgrade they

can imagine to make a simple watch

something more.

Just remember one thing.

In watch circles

those are called complications.

This will mean more to you

when I am winding down.

Buck Creek      Summer, 1938

His mama’s aunt went silent back in ’15, meaning he only had vague recollections of her voice. She never said much and none of it happy. His more recent memories were of something dried, a husk sewn into a rocking chair, a scarecrow whose hollow eyes fixed on the road but never registered any change no matter what drove by. To him, she was the witch out of his meemaw’s tales, only harmless. Words, he decided long ago, were the necessary elements of spells. Without them, a witch was just an old woman, her evil magic roiling in her skull and doing no one else any harm. It was different with the girl from Atlanta. Her rich pappy went off the Franklin road one night, probably drunk, and the Ford dropped about a thousand feet toward the Callusaja. It stopped halfway down, stacked vertical against a tree, nose down, the old man’s neck broke, his wife thrown out and crushed against a boulder at the bottom of the gorge, and the girl child, trapped in the back seat, her leg bent backwards like a tree limb too green to break off. Three days and two nights she sat in that car, screaming, everyone said, staring down through the shattered windshield. Somehow they got her out but the effort loosed the tree’s hold so the car and her father joined her mother’s corpse the rest of the way down. They say she looked at the car as it slipped away and then her face went blank. Whatever magic might live in a young girl’s heart turned to ice that day. She didn’t sit on a porch like his aunt, but in a bed in some private hospital. There were others he knew of. A soldier, his face shot away and apparently his words with it. A young mother who barely survived childbirth but whose heart stopped just long enough to silence her forever. All of them, he imagined, were listening to this storm as it roared up the valley on its way to Cashiers and beyond. Summer storms, wind and rain, sometimes hail, challenged the best-framed barns and houses. Lightning seared light into bedrooms and thunder chased children and their mothers alike under beds as hounds and cats put off their hatred to share the real estate under porches. Folks say they saw haints, demons and dark women flying across the skies, driving storm clouds before them. Random possessions, from porch swings to wheelbarrows, were known to fly through windows and drop through roofs. He leaned his shoulder against the front door and staggered out onto the porch. His wife, down in the churchyard would be shivering the way she always did when the thunder shook her bones. He squinted out into the storm and tried not to think about how she would burrow beneath his arm and fall asleep before the chaos let up, how it made him feel invulnerable and sure his joy would last forever, that this was what God intended and all of heaven swore to him it would continue as long as he was true to her. Straining to stand against the force, he understood why so many went silent. He felt the power of speech tease his brain before being wafted away, just as it had every day for these three years. He threw a sigh into the storm as he turned and then was pushed along on his way back into the dark house where the boy would be huddled in terror, waiting for him to offer comfort and promises he did not have to give. How could he say something magical that would make the storm go away, make it all good again, when he knew the wind spoke his heart better than any words his mind could conjure?

The Sargasso Sea and the Sunset Canal

When your aunt and I would lean over

the bridge above Sunset Canal,

where older boys gigged mullet

and the occasional manatee

would glide by looking like something

made of milk in the green water, itself

dangerous with barracuda or worse.

We would drop pennies

and shudder to think

how it must be for them.

Then we would spit over the railing

to touch the surface

and probe what lurked beneath.

It was as if the things we dropped

into the water’s maw no longer existed,

but of course they continued,

even the saliva as it lost its borders

was still there in the water,

still real to itself,

real as the Sargasso,

because everything is as real

as it is remembered.

Buck Creek      Fall, 1938

This was the boy’s favorite season. Somehow, he thought of autumn as spicy. Brown like cinnamon, red like the cinnamon candy he got on his birthday three years ago, the last one with his mother. So the last one he would ever have. Why did good memories make you sad? Why did the things that made them never stay? Like the leaves, they turned red and gold and then died. It was so true it hurt his chest to think about it. So he didn’t. He was learning to not think about some things. Many things. He tried to tell his father he liked fall once, and the old man almost smiled, his tobacco breath, brown spicy breath, let out a single “yes.” It was a good day. He didn’t like winter. Winter was a giant black bear like the one he had to not think about. He was cold and afraid all winter long. And summer was worse, at least much of the time. Things came out and crawled, waiting for him. The big rattlesnakes, satinbacks, were scariest to most folks. Silent copperheads were harder to avoid, although their poison wasn’t near as deadly. Full grown copperheads often gave a dry bite, just a warning. The babies were worse, born mean and unable, or just unwilling, to hold back their venom. He was most afraid of the water snakes. He no longer even swam in Mirror Lake or down in the Callusaja. The slow water by the lake shores or river bends were the home of black, vicious water moccasins, their cottony mouths the stuff of many of his nightmares. Summer meant water moccasins. And storms. Bone-rattling thunder and rain drumming the tin roof like a crazy bear with steel claws, trying to get in. That bear, the one he smelled every time he was afraid. Spring was nice, for a time. There was a day he woke up and everything had exploded into color, azaleas and wisteria in the valleys where the sun was freest to run her hand lightly over the soil. There would be mountain laurel and rhododendron higher up the mountains and, when he walked the forest, he would see tiny red and blue and purple flowers as sudden as lightning, strewn about wherever the leaves parted enough to let the sun reach in. The sun always tried to reach in. But come spring, his silent father’s face darkened even further and closed even more and he didn’t even answer the boy’s questions but stared ahead as if only a fool would ask, so he stopped.

Pelican Bay

Each goddam pelican has his piling

three—four—six feet above the tide.

Everything has to have its own damned turf,

boundaries, good fences, whatever the hell.

So this one circles around into the wind

(of course they’re all facing into the wind

life is facing the goddam wind)

so this bastard comes up behind one squatter

and then drops down and the other guy

rears up and starts flapping, too, they both

start squawking something godawful with one

just above the other and then the first one,

the new guy, heads back to the sky and does 

another slow circle before he gives up

and heads off to the next row of pilings 

where I guess he sees a vacancy but

what do you think the other guy, the squatter, does?

He spreads out and launches off his spot, dropping

three-four feet so you hear a slap, slap,

and you think it’s his wings slapping the water

but it’s his feet pushing against the water to bounce

his ass up so the wings can work (when your wings

hit the water you’re done for, after all)

and slap-slap-slap he’s up a foot above the waves,

shooting off to find a fish or something

or because he’s bored or bird-horny

or whatever the hell gives Pelicans an itch,

while the others sit there through the whole show

bills tucked in, about as interested as

the sky or the Spanish moss on the shore trees

or the sides of the dozen RVs next door

where a door slams and someone calls

Stu? but no one says Yeh? And the waves

slap the shore and then there’s a car

and everyone is living on his own little spot

in his own little house in his own little body 

except you, of course, and it made me think

I’d like to show you tonight, that’s all.

Buck Creek      Spring, 1940

When night departed it left shadows, doubling the layers of mountains that climbed row-on-row into the sky and dared the boy to cast his eyes all the way into the clear color of morning. In the cold newborn air, he would perch on Sunrise Rock and dangle his feet perilously over death. Each time, Horse Cove below whispered him forward, to test the air. The voices of a dozen confederate mounts sacrificed to feed Hunt’s cavalry and forestall the men’s defeat called to him to step away. Often he would say “No” loudly enough to stir a few birds. Soon the sun would chase him back to his father’s house where his chores awaited. Then to the schoolhouse where Mrs. Talley would be kind to him because he knew the answers and had read the lesson and because, for a time, the other boys teased him and asked what the bear did when it gave him that big hug. They would take turns sneaking up behind him and growling, but after a short while, he no longer flinched. He learned not to hear.