My promise kept.
Tonight I passed along the river
While she slept.
Swift flowed the current down to Winfield,
Silent her door.
There was no light upon the water.
None on the shore.
iii. My Futile Persistence
Now clouds eclipse the eastern headland
And night obscures the sky.
Strong runs the river on through darkness
In which I tethered lie.
Oh, I’ve stood along the shore till evening.
From her window, not a gleam.
Untying the knot, I let the current
Carry my boat downstream.
iv. A Glimmer of Hope
One morn as I ran to Liverpool—
a flounce behind a tree!
Was she looking for me going past,
Secretly?
When I came up from Liverpool
As sun slid down the sky,
Was she waiting there again to watch
Me passing by?
Might it be I’ll run to Harris Ferry
And seal a bargain there?
A gown I’d buy of virgin color,
Stockings of silk and shoes of leather,
And a comb for auburn hair!
v. A Miracle
Came days when joy like Jesus walked
Upon the tide that bears my soul.
All fair that time, no storms, nor night,
Nor cold.
The bush of Moses burned in me,
Night glowed when there was not a moon,
And even the distant shore shone bright
As sunny noon.
A powerful current carried joy
With strength enough to wrest me free
From time to temporize to now
Eternity.
vi. How Much I Dread the End of Summer
It’s coming, love,
Blood’s in the leaf,
Bright shoots of crimson
Before October’s hemorrhage.
I saw white this morning
Curl off the river, love,
First shroud skeins,
Twisted up north.
See that high field where flowers
And weeds embroidered summer
With robes of color, love?
Now turning brown.
Come, be white beneath my fingers,
For most I jealous death.
Keep me in you green always,
Always alive.
Let the blood I feel be blood
Surging to bring us joy, not rue.
Love, then let it come, love,
Oh, let it come.
vii. Sorrowing
But once you let me have my way
And then our life was done.
And I, I could not yet believe
Your love turned cold as stone.
Dark flowed the current, black hung the night,
and not a breeze was sighing,
While you, no longer blood and flesh,
From loving turned toward dying.
viii. (Song of the Riparian Maiden)
Somber as with some mournful purpose,
Silent as with a private grief,
The clouds toward Winfield make an evening
Retreat, retreat.
The one I love rides on the river
As far as the seabirds venture in,
Where the shadows of spires float long on the water
And boatmen sing.
Oh, I sit by the far-flowing Susquehanna
And I watch while the current flows off into time
And I dream of the maid long ago on the river.
Who died, who died.
ix. A Dream
Last night I lay by Harris Ferry
And dreamed my love was dead.
Dark hung the night upon the river,
The night hung heavy on a lover
And starless overhead.
I saw my love all dressed in white,
A gown of white she wore.
White hands upon her breast lay crossed,
Her eyes like bluebells touched by frost,
White lilies in her hair.
From her cold cheek I raised the veil.
I spoke, she made no answer.
My lips I touched to her cold breath,
Then seeing how she’d chosen death,
I gave her to the river.
My love lies sixty miles upstream,
Last night I dreamed she died.
This morn I saw a ghostly sight,
I saw a maid laid all in white,
All cold and still and lily white,
Come floating down the tide.
x. Pain and Loss
And comes there bleeding from the mountain,
Blood rays from the sun,
Have clouds dispersed, exhausted,
Does thunder say, “it’s done”?
Do the cliffs all echo moaning?
Have the fields all turned to stone?
Have I lost all life within me
Since love has gone?
xi. Last Words
While I lay still a bedrock moved,
The angry river thundered by,
And blood-red stars rolled down the sky.
Had I not known, had I not loved,
Had I not once pure passion proved
And calmed her fears to quietude
And kissed the pearly tears she cried,
While bedding with an unwed bride,
Had we not loved would she have died?
MISS EMILY’S ROSE
Beckoning, her fingers were thin as chicken bones. He wobbled to her side of the bed on his cane, a cypress stick, sanded and bent into a crook. Five or six years ago he’d bought it at Clemm’s, with his own money, to help him when he toted the market basket, holding what she’d told him to buy, back to the house. Now, he was using the cane most of the time.
Two days ago she’d lost the strength to reach for her cane, leaning against the night table so she could knock on the rail of the bed to summon him from the back kitchen. Her cane was black, straight and smooth as the barrel of the deer rifle hanging above the mantel in the kitchen. Its gold handle, which she hadn’t instructed him to polish for years now, was shaped like a bird.
The cane had belonged to her father. Before he’d taken to bed, he’d carried the cane whenever he left the house, even in former days when, straight-backed and spring-stepped, he’d had no need of a walking stick. When he’d died, she wouldn’t let anyone near him for three days.
Now that she couldn’t raise an arm, could only waggle her fingers, he felt certain it had come, was perched on the tester above the headboard, waiting, watching down inside the drapery. It would be seeing her as he saw her—a pillow and two bolsters arranged like a body and legs beneath the sheet, above them a face yellow as the pillow slip the back of her head lay on. For the past week he hadn’t bothered to run the comb through her coarse gray hair, now a snarl of whipcords. She paid no heed.
Until a year or so ago her face had been full-fleshed, its skin smooth as a ripe peach. Since she’d shrunk, the skin had wrinkled until she looked like a new-born baby about to cry Except for her eyes—bigger than they’d ever been, they glowed like hot coals.
Low and thin as her voice had become, he could feel h
er breath inside his ear. And he could just make out her words. Smelling and feeling were the best parts he himself had left, though he still could see and hear middling.
What now it was time for, she’d told him yesterday morning. After he’d slid a few spoonfuls of corn meal between her lips, colorless and thin as the edges of the spoons, and past her teeth, still there, where he had only three bottom and two top left, she’d shaken her head, ‘No more.’ As if saving what little voice she had left.
He’d picked up the bowl from the night table and turned to go. “Wait,” she’d whispered. “There are some things I must tell you to do.”
Putting the bowl on the table beside her watch, he’d bent over her. Her breath smelled like sour milk.
What she’d told him hadn’t surprised him. Long ago as it had been, he knew she hadn’t finished with it up there. In spite of what had gone on between her and him all these years. Beginning the night he’d heard her enter his room beneath the cupola. Without knocking. She’d reached over to where he was lying in the rope-bed, wide-eyed. Without a word, she’d taken his hand, not gnarled as it was now, and raised him.
He’d let her lead him down the attic steps. Past the closed door of her father’s bedroom, where, he knew, it was lying in the four-poster her father had died in and he’d heard she’d been born in. Down the front staircase. Into the room across from the parlor, once her father’s library, into which she’d had him move the big walnut bed with its feather mattress, so different from the canvas of the rope-bed he’d been sleeping in that it had taken him many nights to get used to its softness.
She’d come for him the night after the night and early morning the sobbing in her father’s bedroom had turned into screaming, the screaming to moaning, the moaning had died into silence.
Never again had he slept in the narrow bed in the attic room. Not even after they’d given it up between them, nine or ten years ago now that had been. Before that it had dwindled from at first every night, often in the first years more than once, to two or three times a week, to once, to every other week, to every once in while. Always without any talk or false starts. As if each silently read the other’s mind, or whatever part tells when and when not to begin.
It had never been the occasion for many words between them. Not one, not even his name as they’d begin. None during, though at a point she’d always start to moan. Then to scream. Afterward she’d sob until she’d become still as a statue. Just the reverse of what he’d heard in her father’s bedroom that time. From her breathing he could always tell when she’d fallen asleep.
During the years they’d lived together alone in the big old house, both of them graying as it had grayed from weathering, the most frequent words between them were her “Buy cornmeal, flour, eggs, milk, broad beans, cowpeas, apples, mangoes, musk melons. breast of chicken, lamb or pork chops.” Or do this or that. And his “yes’um” and sometimes in answer to a question “no’um.”
If what she’d told him yesterday hadn’t surprised him, that she’d dared to put it off so long, almost until it would have been too late, did make him wonder. Yet it turned out that when she’d no longer had strength to use the cane to knock or do more than signal with her fingers and gesture with her head, she’d known it was time and had just enough breath left to tell him to do it. Yes, she’d been a good calculator.
Because his head shook on his turkey neck all the time now, he wasn’t sure she’d known he’d been nodding as she’d instructed him a step at a time. In fact, in the dimness of that room, where the blinds hadn’t been opened since the night she’d fetched him, he couldn’t be sure she was able to see him at all, what with her sight so far gone as it was.
“When you’ve done precisely as I’ve told you, come back here and inform me. Even though you think I shan’t hear you, I will. And I shall know whether you’ve done just as I say.”
“Yes’um,” he’d replied.
Then as if shooing a mosquito, she’d waved him off.
Now a day later, in the quiet that had presided over the house for many years, her voice was less than a whisper, a mere hiss of air. Yet he knew it was telling him the time had come.
Leaning his cane next to hers against the night table, he bent over the bed. When he lifted her head from the pillow, she felt limp as a sack of grain. The fingers of his other hand groped for the chain he knew was hanging around her neck.
In the sparse daylight that seeped into the house, he’d grown so accustomed to seeing the long gold chain on her person that he noticed it no more than if it were a part of her body, like the brown mole with black hair growing in it on the left side of her chin or the curve of her hairline high on her forehead. She hadn’t taken off the chain since the night she’d gone to the attic for him. When she was dressed, a gold watch, which she’d always carried in the pocket of her skirt, was fastened to it. He’d never seen her consult the watch, even when she’d remove it each night and lay it on the night table, where it was lying now.
In bed he’d felt the small links of the chain against his flesh. Also something else that was hooked on. Not a locket, he could tell. Maybe a Cross, he’d thought, which some people wore, though since the day her father had been buried in the churchyard, beneath a tall gray granite stone bearing the family names and dates, on which her name and birth date were carved beneath her father’s, she hadn’t set foot inside the church.
When he tried to slip the chain over the back of her head, as she’d told him, a link caught in her hair at the nape. While he untangled it by feel, her head didn’t move. It took two more tries before he got all the fine links clear and slipped the chain over her ears, which looked to have grown larger in the last few years. Dangling, the key came out from beneath the sheet. He slid the chain and key into the pocket of his trousers.
Without using his cane, he limped around the foot of the bed and up the side where his pillow lay. Stretching over it, he reached for her head again, felt out a strand of hair using the balls of his forefinger and thumb.
“Watch me closely,” she’d told him yesterday. Her small hand had slowly lifted itself, as if it were being hoisted on invisible wires. The sudden energy with which she’d jerked her hand away from her head surprised him. “When you pull on the hair,” she’d said, “ you must not be afraid you will hurt me.”
Now he was studying her face, to see whether he could make out a wince of pain when he pulled. By their glow he could tell her eyes were fixed on his. He felt the strand of hair, coarse as darning thread, slip from between his fingers.
After feeling out another strand, he wrapped it around his forefinger three times. As he yanked, he saw her eyelids close, as if she’d blinked involuntarily. Then her eyes were riveted back on his. The long strand of hair came out, he could tell. Although he thought he saw her lips quiver, he heard no sound.
There was no need for him to make a dent in his pillow with his fist, as yesterday she’d summoned the strength to show him to. From where his head had been resting a few hours before there was still an indentation. In it he laid the hair.
As she’d told him, he placed one hand on top of the strand, slid the other beneath his pillow. Lifting it, he carried it gingerly, as he would poison he feared he might spill.
Without the cane to lean on, it was a slow scuffle. Especially up the staircase when he didn’t have a hand free to grasp the railing. He laid the pillow on the linen chest, right beside the door. When he wiggled the key out of the pocket of his trousers, there was enough light in the hallway for him to see the key was brass, tinged with green, small but appropriately heavy for the lock on the oak door. It took some jiggling before he got the key in the scutcheon.
The lock didn’t want to turn. Before he heard it give, he had to muster all the strength he could. While holding the porcelain doorknob with its tongue withdrawn, he bumped the door a couple of times with his shoulder. At last the door swung in, groaning on its hin
ges. He felt bruised.
The valanced curtains on the three windows were drawn so there was just a crack of light between them. As he shuffled in, after picking up the pillow from the top of the linen chest, something smacked his nostrils so as almost to take his breath. Not the smell, he knew, from years before when they’d come sneaking onto the lawn after midnight and sprinkled lime around the foundation of the house and on the sills of the cellar door and windows. That smell had died years ago.
What hit him was the dust, acrid dust, so thick that as he shambled through it, carrying the pillow, he had to narrow his eyes to slits. On the gray-brown carpet, under a Morris chair, he saw a pair of shoes. They had been white buck, he recalled, but now looked like two dead rats.
Above them, draped over the rung of the chair, were two yellow rags. From there his eyes went onto the linen suit he’d seen at the kitchen door those many years ago. In the dusk that evening it had been bright white, like the dress a bride would wear. Now folded neatly over the back of the chair, it was yellow as the pages of the books he’d used to dust. When he reached the bed, he kept his eyes down. Yet he had to see what was on the pillow on the other side and what below the pillow was covered with moldy rags on top of the mildewed sheet. There was enough room on the side he was standing on for him to place the pillow just as she’d said to. He felt for the strand of hair. He could feel it in the hollow of the pillow.
Before leaving, he lowered his stiff bones until he was on his knees, as if kneeling in prayer at the bedside. Scraping up a handful of dust from the carpet, he scattered it over his pillow and the strand of hair, as she’d told him. Then he ratcheted himself onto his feet.
As he scuffed back toward the door, he spied his sole prints in the dust, as if the floor he’d hobbled across were sand. Their eyes, he guessed, would go somewhere else when they’d break down the door to see what was in the room. And when they’d enter, the prints they’d make would mingle with his. To turn the key as he left, locking the door, took less strength.
After he’d said, with his lips almost touching her ear, “Ah done done whad ya tole me to up theyah, evythin xactly,” he saw her eyes flutter. That meant it was still perched on the tester above the headboard. Her eyes were glowing cinders.
Taking his cane from where it was leaning against the night table, he was about to shuffle off to the back kitchen to wait. In all the years they’d slept in the same bed, he’d never eaten a morsel in her presence. She’d take the velvet-covered chair, with brass finials on its shoulders, at the head of the mahogany table in the dining room. When he’d cleared her meal, he’d eat leftovers of the same food he’d prepared for her, at the deal table in the back kitchen.