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Show Go Love/152 own spot, cows mooing off beyond the ponds and fences and forests of Solgahatchia on the Trail of Tears. He'd never ride in a funeral party, one that rattles down muscadine-lined gravel roads in Arkansas, past hunt clubs and fall down homesteads. He'd never piss his name on the patch of earth that would someday have him, do the Stepwell jig across bitterweed and brown-eyed Susan on the hill that forever overlooks a lightning struck tree where cows go on chewing the green green grass of home. He'd never be appointed his brother's keeper or lay block around his dead, the trowel's metallic shring singing out through the hickories. He'd never learn the old finisher's trick of brushing seam cracks with a fine paint brush, conjoining the granite to stone. My own maternal grandfather showed me the trick in a thunderstorm when he, very well-bourboned, danced until he fell down on his own spot, then mine, knocking pipe fire out on his prosthetic leg The straight-lines and stone grit between us, the physical work of all this, what Dirky Lee will never get in a million years, watching my mother's father lay down the heavy stones around his own father, who, in turn, had once lain down the big stones for his own father-the sons of four generations of Stepwells buried at the blocked-in feet of their fathers. Once, stars glittering on the stones, I unfurled my sleeping bag beside my brother and told him I wished it was me. I'll trade, I said. This was August, around the first birthday he missed. How I puked up the sky. The air stank with bull frog and cicada and whippoorwill, those three hard notes sung again and again forever. And the moon shone on his stone where it said Here Lies Our Precious Son James Steven Harvell August 25, 1966-May 9, 1986 |