Tuesday, July 26, 1864

Coming out of it…



STORY SO FAR: The Confederate States of America is becoming a hollow shell that the Union Army is quickly piercing. Atlanta is under attack. But just when it seems that life may be settling down to a new routine and the war may be over, a tornado rips through the farm.

All of us, thanks be to God, are spared.

And the house is of a piece.

But the barn is gone,

Old Jed crushed dead

beneath the weight

of sheared and falling timbers.

Today, the ordinary hum of insects creeps back in,

that and the sound of water slipping through its stony bed.

The sun’s warm hand pressed against my face,

I take stock of what we’ve got:

the most part of the crops still standing with their weight of corn,

my family breathing,

my own hands strong and able.

How much you gonna take away? I ask,

looking up toward heaven.

On the front porch, Little Sister

rocks herself, hands clasped,

her head upon them, weeping.

I brush a strand of hair away,

and look into her eyes.

“Let me see it?” I ask.

She looks at me and pulls her hands

close against her chest. “Please,”

I say, and slowly she unfolds

her fingers. She holds it out to me.

Yesterday, after the storm had passed,

I ran to Ma. She was curled in the grass,

stunned and looking deep into the sky,

as if a door had almost opened,

this pendant like a drop of precious blood

hanging loosely from her hand.

It is a gift she’d thought forever lost

until that moment,

the storm clouds bearing down,

she reached into the grass.

Now, Little Sister hands it to me.

I click the little clasp and pull

the tiny golden leaves apart.

There, as though engraved into my mother’s heart, the words:

To my dear wife,

together till the end of time

Your loving husband

June 1849



After dinner, Ma retires to her corner,

rocks slowly in a cadence of her own.

Months now, she has grown more still,

as if the crops were draining her,

sucking out her life as the corn grew tall.

“Ma,” I say, but she just sits, moonlight

carving her in silhouette against the windowpane.

“Ma,” I try again. “I’m going for a walk.”

Outside, the air has cooled. The moon

drifts up above the mountain like a dream

I used to have when I was young:

I am floating on the surface of the pond,

but it is not a pond: it’s air, and I know

that I have left the earth to join the stars.

All the townsfolk swim below

like fish with faces of real people,

and the moon shines through

in waves of silver fog.

I can hear my parents calling,

and I reach toward them.

But I cannot find them. Their voices fade,

and the stars begin to sink.



•

I’m standing at the field’s edge,

broken stalks of corn strewn everywhere,

the noise of crickets rising, falling,

and rising again, their song an anthem

to the way that things go on.

Pappy’s whistling somewhere in the dark.

Faint light whispers from the parlor window,

and there, still as death in its dim glow,

my mother sits, staring into darkness.



Next Week: Barn raising . . .

Text copyright 2004 by Craig Crist-Evans

Illustrations copyright 2004 by Anna Rich

Reprinted by permission of Breakfast Serials, Inc., www.breakfastserials.com