All in the merry month of May

Darl

He lays there with the covers pulled up like dirt.

His eyes move but don’t see, not past the wall. He is already turned toward it.

Squatting, Barbara Allan’s wet dress shapes for the dead eyes of three blind men those mammalian ludicrosities which are the horizons and the valleys of the earth. You can see her trying not to breathe through it.

He sends the old one. Not his voice. (The voice of the dying can’t cross the fields on its own. It needs legs. It needs a mule.)

The bell rings before the body knows to stop. I hear it before she does. The smile of Barbara Allan has ashes on its lips.

Barbara Allan

I was washing when he came.

The servant. Standing there like a question. The water had gone cold and my hands felt like someone else’s.

He said, Your name Barbara Allan? and I didn’t answer at first. He knew it was. They always know the name before they speak it.

I got up slow because there’s no other way to walk toward the dying. The dust on the road stuck to my dress like fingers.

He was lying in that bed like something already measured. I looked at him and felt nothing. I said, Young man, I think you’re dying.

I remembered the tavern. The heat and the fiddle and the toast. How his glass lifted without me in it. I remembered that and said it. I don’t know why.

He turned his face like I’d hit him. Maybe I had. Maybe that’s what words are.

Sir James the Graham

It was the laughing that did it. That night.

I toasted the women because they smiled. Because they made the night feel wide and empty and I didn’t want to say her name.

Barbara Allan sits inside your chest like a seed you swallowed wrong. She grows crooked. She don’t ask to. She just does.

I told the man to fetch her. I told him to say, If your name be Barbara Allan. Like he didn’t already know it was.

She came like winter.

She said, You’re dying. I said, Adieu, adieu to all my friends. And be kind, be kind to Barbara Allan. I said it knowing they wouldn’t be. I turned my face to the wall because the wall don’t look back.

The Servant

I been with him since he had knees scabbed up from climbing trees. Now he can’t climb no more and he sends me walking, because I got legs and he don’t.

I tell the girl like he told me. If your name be Barbara Allan ... She don’t say nothing. Just wipes her hands on her apron like maybe I’m not even there.

She got that hard look. It don’t bend, even in May.

Darl

When I reach the top, he has quit sawing. Standing in a litter of chips, he is fitting two boards together.

Between the shadow spaces they are yellow as gold, like soft gold, bearing on their flanks in smooth undulations the marks of the adze blade: a good carpenter, Cash is.

He holds the two planks on the trestle, fitted along the edges in a quarter of the finished boxes.

He kneels and squints along the edge of them, then he lowers them and takes up the adze. A good carpenter.

Barbara Allan could not want a better one, a better box to lie in. It will give her confidence and comfort. I go on to the house, followed by the                                                              Chuck.    Chuck.    Chuck. of the adze.

The Bell

BARBARA ALLAN I said it once and they didn’t hear.

BARBARA ALLAN I said it again and they closed their windows.

BARBARA I rang and rang until her name was the only sound left in the grass.

ALLAN I don’t stop. They don’t make me stop. I stop only when they bury her.

Barbara Allan

I heard the death bell knellin’ in the field. It kept saying my name like someone drowning. And every note, it seemed to say, Hard-hearted Barbara Allan.

I said, Take me home, but there was no one there.

They say women cry easy. But the crying came hard. It cracked me open. I felt it like a nail under the ribs.

I knew then. I knew what I’d done.

Oh, pick me up and carry me home. I fear that I am dying.

Darl

They buried him in the old ground. The one where the stones lean like drunks and the grass grows tired.

They put her in the new one. Bright and boxed and clean. Love don’t stay in neat rows.

From his grave the rose climbed out like a secret. From hers, the green briar came like regret.

They reached. They curled. They met in the air and tied themselves into a knot not even God could tear asunder.

The Rose and the Briar

We did not ask to grow. They put them down in separate dirt, but grief don’t know how to stay in its own row.

He was warm still when I began — just barely. Just a red pulse in the root. She was cold when I started, cold as any thing that dies and don’t ask to come back.

We grow because love don’t end where they bury it. It stays in the dark, twisting like a question with no mouth.

They said her heart was hard. But I came up through it anyway. I felt it crack. It made a sound like wet wood breaking.

We don’t grow fast. We grow slow, like memory. Like forgiveness.

Every inch of us had to feel the space between them. We reached across it. The road. The fence. The silence. We reached.

I was red — blazing, soft, wanting. I was green — sharp, wild, clinging.

We climbed until we couldn’t climb no more. We met in the air above their bones and we tied ourselves together. Not in a knot made by hands.

A knot made from everything they didn’t say.

We grow still.

Darl

The curfew tolls the knell of parting day.