Manmade

I can almost see the cardboard suitcase

you sat on in the middle of the narrow road

like a scar between fallow fields. It must have been winter.

You wear an old black coat tight for your tall frame.

In the picture I imagine

you are on your way

to meet your beau—

you never told me his name—

coming home for you.

But then I see your face

is spare and stripped like the trees

and understand this

is the trip home,

the train arriving empty

and no other due.

A farmer’s wagon took you

this far back. Yes, you whispered,

your journey had been hard as unplowed ground.

Your pa found you here, like he knew

where to look. Back home

he nodded once

setting down your suitcase.

You went back

to cooking and cleaning,

splashing your morning face

with cold water like your mama

told you to before she died

to keep roses on your cheeks.

Though so did the woodstove’s heat,

water boiling for laundry,

bean picking, pie making

in the middle of the day.

Never asking why

the train was empty, no one

told you but pity

in the eyes 

on Sunday at church—

poor thing’s one chance lost

to the Great War.

Later, like your daddy, Widower George

admired those roses on your face and wanted you

to run his big place a few miles over.

He knocked on the kitchen door.

“Miss? Your daddy said I could

have you.” I imagine you

stiffened a little if not a lot, maybe grunted

in that way you have to stop

things at your throat.

He didn’t expect an answer

to what no one had asked. You

packed your favorite apron

collaged with berry stains.

Your favorite cooking spoon,

the best knife. Your dowry

your daddy didn’t grieve.

Your other dress. Your gardening shoes.

You tucked the piece of lace

you’d carried in your suitcase

inside your mama’s bible

to remind you of your place.

***

I’m imagining all this too.

The old man –I’ll say it:

Grandpa—taking you to his bed nights

while his daughter slipped

out her bedroom window

to meet the town boy at the river.

Never mind

the sons who came and went

bold and noisy through the front door

no questions asked. Come late spring,

after the garden was in the ground,

your own first boy came. The second,

the next year on a July day

after you’d picked tomatoes

and heard the last jar seal.

Like my father, he seemed to know

work came first. The next year,

another, and the next.

I know what I know

from the fragments you showed me

like soap opera trailers through the years.

The rest stitched together like the scraps

from home-sewn pants you wore

for twenty years after Grandpa died, bold

black and white swirls,

navy stripes quilted

to that sale-table-green backside.

***

“Don’t want no man,”

you told the widowers who called.

You tore down the drafty farmhouse

in exchange for the cheap cinderblock

with sweaty walls my uncle built for you

in exchange for everything you owned.

Daddy stopped by every day to see you

sitting on the carport swing.

He told me, you know,

that you never once hugged him

but he always knew you loved him.

Now that I think about it,

I never heard you say the word myself,

though I know how it smelled. Crisp

bacon on a Saturday morning. Cleaned pressed sheets.

An Easter perm at Rita Sue’s. Nadinola face cream.

In summer, blanched beans cooling,

hot fat on collard greens.

***

We never talked about this either.

The summer I took up with the local rebel.

I asked, but no one said no,

so I made a show of riding around

days on his motorcycle, evenings

in a red Firebird

that always seemed to stall

down some dark side road.

Still no one pulled me back

from that dark crack in the earth.

They left me to it.

Even you,

when you finally spoke

your disapproval, this is what you said:

“Think about your daddy.”

***

I do. Every day. Sooner or later

I think of you in your narrow bed,

one bloody hand always reaching

for Psalm 63:

I meditate on thee in the night.

Because thou hast been my help.

Your front door ajar.

Daddy and Uncle Ed going in armed

with a pistol and a hammer

finding you in bed

your other hand against the wall

inked with exclamation marks of terror.

The man asleep there in your blood,

jerked up to Daddy’s pistol in his face.

I imagine stopping on this frame.

Daddy in the balance

interrupted

by something like a voice:

Vengeance is mine, saith the Lord.

Daddy listening hard

to hear it again

as truck drivers carried the story

up and down the state

of the coward who didn’t shoot

the man who killed his mama.

Listening for it

in the nightmares, in the waking

to live it all again. Eventually

in the dark tunnels of chemo,

in the relentless taunting

that razed his body

into a necessary silence

you would have understood.

Yes, I think of Daddy,

of you, this conversation

I would never want to have.

Of the resolve in your eyes

as you sat on that suitcase

and saw your future shapeshift

in the wagon’s dust. You waited

for the next man who would pick you up

and let you down.

First published in Talking River, Fall and Winter, 2014, Issue 37, page 71