The Act of Telling

by Sammy Parker

                                                      

I.

Years past its prime,

the old barn now holds only

the night’s cool, pale moonbeams;

daytime’s silent, sunlit slants; and

faint, crackly dust

—coaxed upward at a footfall or by

slight breezes through uneven cracks in

gray, sun-bleached walls—

the dry, brittle residue of

thousands of long-gone bales of

golden southern hay.

The sloping fields are

long fallow, random shrieks of crows

the solitary sound of import, like

rifle shots on a windless day in

a vast, hushed, snow-filled forest.

Around the corner of

the time-skewed fence,

the slumbering house

abuts a rocky downward slope,

descending to a tree-lined density and

narrow river rapids, flowing

cold and clear from

the deep cleft between

winding high ridges,

above and far away.

The house, too, is empty.

II.

I remember myriad days in

the 1950s and early ‘60s:

white clapboards old even then;

the pockmarked tin roof, echoing

the somnolent patter of spring rain and bearing

the winter weight of heavy mountain snow;

the spacious, staid wrap-around porch;

sultry watermelon-and-cold-beer summer afternoons;

Blue Ridge crisp and cool of autumn;

tall oaks, pines, and hemlocks

framing the view of

the deep, elongated valley;

the swish and rustle of wind through trees; and                                                        

the muffled sonority of river rush below.

In sagging

cane-bottom chairs and

worn hardwood rockers,

we spoke and listened in a kind of

crosstalk animation:

my dad and mom;

my brother, I, and scruffy cousins;

eccentric and unfamiliar aunts and uncles;

and a motley, shifting assortment of

friends and neighbors:

loggers and small-acre farmers,

men in workday-sweat-stained fedoras,

bib overalls, and worn flannel shirts,

rolling out of Ford pickups, full of

Bud, Early Times, convivial bluster,

deep in common sense and

no pretense to guile or sophistication;

strong, no-nonsense women, full of

recipes and gossip and

vague tendrils of

unspoken love and longing,

complacent yet wary in the way of

strength, the residue of

oft-tested resolve.

All of us—family and friends and

I by default— seemed

quietly subservient to

my grandmother and her sister,

matriarchs by silent acclaim,

consorts long gone, dead and otherwise.

They spoke slowly, no thought rushed, and

laughed with pitch and tone like

fresh-churned butter and blackstrap molasses;

sturdy, steady women with few complaints,

little in the way of

self-pity, braggadocio, or

superficial religiosity.

Damnedest thing I’d ever seen,

and for many years,

I had no idea, no idea at all, of

why or how this all came to be or

what was                                                                                                                     

the locus of those women’s

wordless centrality.

III.

At the old kitchen table in mid-winter ’70,

she shared with me her part.

The house was still and

the room too hot from

wood-fire heat and window panes

covered outside in thick, translucent plastic.

Beyond the over-warm and the

big, old quietness of it all,

wind-whipped snow blew

down the valley from

the cold, high, eastern mountain tops.

No one else around

—don’t remember why—

just she and I,

the boy grown up,

the old woman winding down,

some trust in me,

some sense of rightness in

time and place.

In her slow, southern lilt—

words low pitched and gruff with

age and Tube Rose snuff and

brow-creased pauses meant, I guessed,

to get it all just right—

I heard of

the death by gunshot of her husband

on an early, bitter morning, February ’33;

the pain and deprivation of Depression

made real and stark and human faced;

the smug and giddy ‘20s,

lumber and crops, land, money to burn;

the bookend wars of horror,

her oldest son, my sad and sunken uncle,

returned from the last,

bereft of soul and spirit and meaning,

all left in tatters in

the warm and bloody waters of

the South Pacific;

small joys in the shiny-bright ‘50s;

birth and death, marriage and divorce,

strain and tenderness;                                                                                                 

the interplay of love and

seething, frayed tension,

reconciliations and estrangements;

the mystifying, enigmatic, alchemic

push and pull and power of blood across

her scattered, complex family;

the extent of her efforts,

the limits of her influence;

the hope and

the loss of hope; and

the unexpressed, relentless

spirit to persevere

— always, always to persevere—

that did not require

understanding or articulation,

neither hers nor mine.

IV.

She ended, purged, it seemed.

I sat, quiet and rapt,

exhausted by

the sweep and depth of

what I now knew,

not equipped to process all but

somehow sure without

demand of thought or analysis

that future weights would be easier to

understand if not to bear;

that her hard-edged truths

were for me

some new strength; and that in

some rich, inexplicable way,

our lives would be better:

mine for the knowing,

hers for the sharing.

SAMMY PARKER taught English at Western Carolina University and the University of Tennessee, Knoxville and had poems published in multiple editions of the literary journals at both. A native of the mountains of western North Carolina, he lives in Georgia, is a U. S. Air Force veteran, and worked in technical publications at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. Among too many others to mention, he enjoys the poetry of Whitman and Billy Collins and the fiction of Hemingway, Faulkner, Styron, Toni Morrison, Geraldine Brooks, and Elmore Leonard.  Poems of his were published in Belle Rêve Literary Journal and Red River Review.