The boy hates taking his grandmother anywhere,
it means useless hours in front of stories of people
long dead, or dead to him.
He's at that age
of inconveniences, of knowing what he considers
to be enough.
The front room smells of dust and something burnt,
just as he thought it might. And the old couple torpidly slips
into their chairs as if they are being swallowed alive;
the same dull looks he had seen on blue gills and crappie.
The grandmother tries to draw him in,
but her praises of his good deeds and accomplishments
are like trying to pull something heavy
with a small thread.
This clock is over two hundred years old,
the old man says.
It is black and square and looks like a coffin.
On the side are carved the numbers 1772. It doesn't work,
the boy says, his eyes finding something to occupy:
old, older.
Its the oldest thing we have. Your great-great...grandfather...
the boy wonders if he can lay any claims to this clock,
but surely the scores of generations framed around the room
have spread his claims too thin.
Can I go outside? He asks,
and leaves
them there, with their clock.
Outside there is a barn
with a frightening lean. Black and white cats,
like the illegitimate offspring of the Holsteins in the field,
sup at a fly-speckled hubcap filled with milk. They blow away
when he approaches.
These are not the house cats
he has known.
Near the barn are ceramic jugs,
the raised XXX
calls him near,
as they have called many before him.
They are filled with spider's web
and spiders
and grey dirt.
But he pretends to drink from them anyway.
This is much better
than inside with the recollected.
Inside the barn
it is bone marrow black
with only the falling dust,
which seems to keep falling,
illuminated. Then there is hay,
grey and moldy,
and some boards,
also greyed and laid bare of their intentions
to right the lazy barn.
And then something whisks past his face,
like a cold breath,
only
there was blood. It comes again,
this time his hair
is torn away.
It is a barn swallow, he sees it flit into the loosened rafters,
disappear,
and then there it is again, whooshing past his face,
its black wings
appear like scissors, sheering the air.
He picks up a board.
Thwuh. FFFlititit. More blood,
on his face. He's worried his eye
might be scratched, but he's worried more
that he will be defeated
in leaving the house.
He swings again, and
Tuh. The bird lays
at his feet. Its neck lolls over and its beak, like a paper game, opens and closes, black tongue
retracts. Its tomato orange stomach moves a little, and the thin feet, the outstretched toes,
also
open and flinch, grasping at the air the wings had cut, spreading wide enough only to pluck
a green grape,
or clutch one of its own eggs.
Inside the house they are silent.
Could it have been rabid?
A mud dauber? The old couple calls everything on the farm after
what it is known for. No.
Could it have just gone crazy?
Not likely. They speak to him like this. In homey truths.
And then the grandmother ventures,
She might have been protecting
her nest.
But surely his grandmother is wrong in this thing as well.
He never saw a nest, he pleads. Only the dark figure of a bird and
his own blood at the tips of his fingers.