The bats don’t care what key I use.
They swing from the barber shop roof
and drop into the evening.
I try a chord.
One string buzzes against the fret.
At seventy, I buzz a little too.
Tomorrow they close the old road.
The new reservoir will cover its low stretch.
There is a notice by the cattle guard:
last traffic out by eight.
I have come before the water,
with my father’s songs and my own guitar,
to sing where someone once knew them.
Nobody lives here now.
Nobody’s waiting for the next verse.
Across the street a loose sign strikes its pole,
then stops,
as though it has decided
that was enough music.
At noon my sister Fern said,
“I won’t come with you.”
She stood in her kitchen
wrapping plates for her move.
“I’ve packed one house already this week.
I don’t need to visit a town full of them.”
“It might be the last time.”
“That’s why you’re going.
It doesn’t mean I have to.”
She put a cracked plate in a box.
I reached to take it out.
“Still holds toast,” she said.
I promised to be back before morning.
She promised to wait with the truck.
Neither promise was the one
I first wanted from her.
My father cut hair in this shop.
He knew a man’s mood by how he sat down.
Good news: lean back.
Bad news: both feet flat,
eyes on the mirror,
waiting to look different.
When the freight work went away,
Dad kept sweeping the floor.
There were fewer heads to clip,
but hair still had to be swept.
He sang while he worked.
He said singing cost nothing.
Mother stitched clothes at our table.
Her work had a price.
Some people paid it late.
Some brought eggs instead.
She counted what we had
and said it wasn’t enough.
Tonight I sing Dad’s song about a horse
that wouldn’t cross a creek.
The door has fallen inward.
My voice reaches the back wall
and comes home smaller.
I let it finish that way.
At the dance hall I don’t go inside.
Half the roof is on the floor.
The safe place is the street,
where I can see a strip of stage
through the broken front window.
Mother once missed a step here.
Dad tried to catch her,
missed her elbow,
and caught a stranger’s hat.
Mother laughed so hard
she had to sit out the tune.
I remember that better
than the tune itself.
How she leaned over her knees,
breathing between laughs,
while Dad returned the hat
with the face of an honest thief.
I play what I remember.
The middle goes wrong.
I don’t begin again.
An old song can limp
and still reach
the far side of the room.
Outside the school, the moon rises.
The steps are still there.
I sat on them the day Mother told me
she had found sewing work in another town.
Real wages. A rented room.
Enough space for Fern and me.
Dad said he would follow
when he could sell the shop.
He meant it at the time.
I was twelve and knew
how to make a sentence hurt.
I told Mother she was leaving us behind.
She sat on the step below mine.
“You’re coming with me.”
“You’re leaving everything.”
She held our bus fare in one hand.
“Do I have to keep you hungry
to prove I love this place?”
I said nothing.
I thought that counted as winning.
We left two days later.
Dad came after another winter.
He never sold the shop.
There was no buyer.
I had years to tell Mother
that I was glad she took us.
I used those years
for other things.
I don’t ask the school to forgive me.
I don’t ask the wind to carry a message.
Mother cannot hear this song.
I can.
That’s the part
I have been avoiding.
I sing about the room we rented:
a stove that clicked before it lit,
Fern sleeping sideways,
Mother coming home with enough money
to buy pears
when they weren’t marked down.
I sing her laugh badly.
Nobody could sing that laugh well.
It started low,
then climbed past any note
I could find on a string.
The town has gone quiet around me.
It was quiet before I came.
For one breath I expect an answer,
and don’t get one.
Then I take another breath
and use it myself.
The sky is paling over the ridge.
I haven’t sung everything.
There’s no time to sing everything.
Fern is waiting at the cattle guard.
Soon the road crew will come.
I put the guitar on my back
and walk down the empty street.
The song about our rented room
has one more verse.
I sing it while I walk,
with nothing to help but my steps.
Fern leans out of the truck window.
“That’s not how the last bit goes.”
“I know.”
She gives me the first line.
Her voice is rough from staying up.
Mine isn’t much better.
I climb in beside her.
She starts the truck.
We finish while she turns it,
one voice ahead of the other,
both of us laughing
when we reach different words.
Loading comments…