Premeditatio Malorum
The old people dealing cards at the picnic table in porchlight —
a study in chatter and laughter and smoke, in yellow buglight and shadow—
are a comfort that grants the children this freedom, this courage
to wander the edges of darkness, to leap at the moths that flutter
over our heads in the August heat, to part the grasses and search
for the creaking katydids, to sit in the outhouse and stare
at the Hopalong Cassidy poster while spiders shake their webs
in the ceiling corners. I try to name all the cousins daring the pathways
through the orchard — David, Linda, Kenny. I cannot remember them all.
The flooded quarry is already half-memory, half-possibility. If I’d had the words
I might have said “this phenomenal dark,” “this proffered bounty,”
“this moment eternal.” The orchard lifts its gnarled arms in moonlight.
August and the apples already rotting in the grass, all day swarmed
by yellow jackets and black, wing-flicking wasps. A rising sweetness
in the humid air. House of yellow siding and thwack of screen door.
House of lemonade and lace, of blue doors and crowded hallways.
Of bright bowl on a rickety table. Of lilacs and toads. Nighthawks
meeping, whip-poor-wills whistling their names in the wild raspberries
and sumac. I am too young to imagine even the next moment.
Caught between the evening’s ruckus and the stars’ scintillant quiet.
Caught in the drama of departure. While the uncles and aunts
and cousins line up for their empty dishes and goodbyes.
I want to be everywhere and nowhere. Bluebirds
in the orchard, box turtle in the pathway. A lather of tease
and counter-tease. A scrum of the unruly. I’m the one hiding
in shadow, dodging the aunts’ kisses and hugs. I’m the one
who crayoned his name on the outhouse wall. Soon I will be
the one who has to gather the younger cousins and herd them home.
Soon the bright sun will rummage through these lineages,
these adenoidal boys, sorting them into the living and the dead.
A fistful of jacks and a ball. A pocketknife. A scattering of soldiers
in their shale forts, patrolling the dirt roads, an anachronism of trucks
in a makeshift lot. I am thinking maybe time is the answer.
Time that marks and scars us — the ruined berries, the poison ivy
reddening where it curls around the maples. Spume of spores
above the puffballs. What is left for the imagination? Memory
is a knothole in a fence, a skewed view, a bend in the high-grass path,
a black racer’s waterslick tail going and gone. And later, sluggish pipefish
unscrolling in the sunlit shallows. Horseshoe crabs scuttling like tanks
down the drainage channel from the treatment plant.
Another day and I’m in a city alley, brmmming a dumptruck
beside the red-haired freckled boy I am told is David. Although
I don’t know it yet, we’ll soon be gone from this neighborhood.
My father will stand alone in this same alley and turn red
with rage when he sees that his wife and boys have vanished.
Time will have ruined everything. Or that is the illusion — time
as a succession of movements away from and toward, until suddenly
I am in Santa Fe, New Mexico, wondering how anything,
anything at all could happen as it has, as it will. As it must have?
But that is a religious question, and I
am six years old. God is the pollen in the air, the light
breeze churning it, the sunlight dazzling it with presence.