WHERE DARKNESS FALLS
EARLY ON THE FIELDS
Part One
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The Way of the Wind
in the Summer Fields
A hot summer night in the early fifties.
From a third-story window I looked out across
the deserted highway where, silhouetted
in the light of an open garage door,
a t-shirted trio of older boys
stood leaning against the hood of a Hudson.
The GULF sign creaked in its frame and the drone
of the dashboard radio drifting across
the highway was intermittantly lost
in the rustling that rose up out of the fields.
I was five and a half years old and certain
such country extended without any end
and that undercurrents of wind amid corn
were the voices of all who had ever labored
or died in those acres, their murmured phrases
suffusing our summer nights like the sigh
of an inland sea, and their presences,
like thoughts that are not entirely formed,
converging upon the peripheries
of our pastures at dusk.
I leaned on the sill,
detecting a sudden freshness of rain
in an eddy of wind and, looking across
the darkened highway, I saw the boys shielding
their eyes from the blowing dust... as, slowly,
the wind tapered off and the exhalation
of all the surrounding fields became still.
Two of the boys began walking away
while the other pulled open the Hudson's door,
slid in behind the wheel and drove off,
heading westward into the night, his glowing
tail-lights receding until they were lost.
I stretched from the window, intending somehow
to see where it was he had disappeared,
gazing as any small child will do
until I could see beyond seeing, until
I could follow the dual points of light
traversing a ghostly terrain, a region
of glimmering distances measured out
by a line of nebulous telephone poles
and wavering furls of wind-- and I heard,
as though it were only my own breathing,
a sibilance off the surrounding sea
of unmown grasses and midsummer corn
receding forever beneath the stars...
And peering out into the dusk of the fields,
into the silver subliminal heart
of the hour, I saw, like so many shreds
and tatters of vapor, unnumbered souls
ascending from row after rustling row
in sinuous tendrils, their voices distilled
into long ethereal dirges of loss--
of whispery, dispirited voices
as legion as all the quivering leaves
on myriad stalks in a thousand fields
extending across the breadth of the county.
Something in the rising wind broke the spell,
a loose board banging or crack of a limb--
I couldn't be certain. The pump and garage
of the filling station, the sycamore
maintaining its watch by the empty road,
had all subsided to shadow. The fields
were indistinguishable in the dark.
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The Morning You
Came to the Hayfield
The swath overturned and tumbled like surf
before the tines' whirling-- side-delivered,
folded and fluffed in a windrow. The earth
was rolled in a humid warmth, it was steeped
in a summer fragrance, but I was stirred
less by aroma of hay lightly heaped
as by your appearance there at the far
edge of the hayfield, a shy visitor.
The sky was a curved limpid shell of blue
eddied with breezes. The sun-cured harvest,
hoisted by fork to the high spacious loft,
would last the winter. The image of you,
your skirt in clover, your lineaments soft,
would in half an hour be all but lost.
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An Abandoned Bridge
on Spoon River
The decrepit ironwork spanning the Spoon
has carried no traffic for decades now
except for the truants who brazen the bowed
timbers to cross it. As such boys will,
in the manner of boys immemorial,
they loiter midway, lounge about, lie down
and, peering through rifts in the rotted wood,
beguiled by that which only boys know,
they gaze on the mud-laden current below.
Cumuli pile above a near meadow
where breezes conspire, ruffling the calm
of leaves and rippling the water's film.
The boys hardly notice, gazing as though
the bridge were the rim of a sacred well
and the river-- some whispering oracle.
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From a Porch at Dusk
Where willow verges on meadow, several
hollows sink into gloom, coalescing
as vapor, violet air, ephemeral
constellations of fireflies rising,
pulses of shadowy song-- recesses
like lambent water seen through an arras
of velvety boughs, the fringe of evening
feathering vaguely out, extending
filaments over the glimmering lawn
'till air is enigma, earth unknown.
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In a Late-Summer Field
at Nightfall
Even in the absence of any breeze,
in this field a full mile from any house,
where not so much
as the distant bark of a neighbor's dog
or even chirp of a cricket is heard,
there is something
remotely audible, intermittant,
a tenuous susurration, more shadow
of sound than sound,
a stirring that slips among rows of corn
like the breath of someone without a breath,
of someone lost,
disoriented and languid with dream,
who has just awakened to find herself
in midst of a field
so imbued with the filmy blue of dusk
and of such obscure delineation,
she senses it
as part of her own insubstantial realm ~
till it dawns upon her... and what I hear
or partially hear,
returns to shadow.
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The Itinerant
He had stayed on a week, this taciturn man,
this man who, despite having taken meals
each day at her table, had never once
found reason to speak of his purpose or past--
never, that is, until the last evening
when, as she was reaching to pass a bowl
of boiled potatoes, he told her that he
would leave with the morning.
And, later, as they
stood framed in the doorway, their talking done
and he on his way to the barn, she told him,
"Wait here a little," and disappeared back
through the parlor, returning almost at once
to place a few bills in his hand. She desired
to ask him where he would go, to ask him
where he was going the morning he passed
the farm and had stopped to inquire for work,
but she felt a reluctance to ask what he
had not volunteered himself, and she said,
"I am grateful to you for all you have done."
He nodded and thought once again of how
he had seen her that day alone in the field,
doggedly heaving bales on a wagon,
and he asked of her, "How long can it be,
with your husband dead and two hundred acres
of crops coming on-- how long can you last,
a woman alone on so large a farm?"
"For as long as Heaven intends," she replied,
and he nodded once more and, squarely placing
his hat on his head, made ready to leave.
"Must you go just yet?" she asked him softly,
"I have put on a pot of coffee." He turned
and seemed for a moment to study her,
then once again took his hat in his hand.
"You can sit on the swing," she motioned, stepping
back through the door. "I won't be a minute,"
but when she returned with two steaming cups,
she found him sitting instead on the rail
with his back to the post. She smiled and said,
"Do you dislike comfort, Mr McCann?"
He seemed to be gazing at something out
in the dark of the night. "I am fine," he said.
She held out a brimming cup. "It is strong
and scalding," she warned, "and probably bitter."
He took it with what she thought was a smile,
the merest trace of a smile, and eased
a savoring sip. She moved to the swing
and sat on it lightly, holding her cup,
and he saw how the simple hem of her skirt
swirled once at her ankles and then was still.
From somewhere out of the darkness there came,
from a distant pasture, the melancholy
lowing of a bull... and she knew, however
long before daylight she might walk out
to offer him coffee or food for the road,
she would find him gone and, struck by the thought,
she asked of him quickly, "Where will you go?"
"West, I suppose," was all that he said.
"Have you no family?" There, it was out.
"None that would have me around," he replied,
and she knew by the way that he turned to look
at nothing at all, at the empty night,
she had asked too much, and she feared that he
would rise to his feet and bid her good night,
but he kept his place and, to her surprise,
looked back at her gently. And what she said next,
what she found herself saying, was nothing that she
had so much as thought: "I would like you to stay,"
and she almost gasped to hear herself say it.
She thought that she heard him sigh as he said,
"It wouldn't work out." "I could pay you more,"
she countered at once, with a sinking sense,
but he shook his head firmly. "It's not the pay."
"Well, what is it then?" and she heard in her voice
a tremor of pleading and hated the sound.
"I am sorry," she said. "I have no right to ask."
He sought for some word to reassure her,
this woman with whom he had felt more at peace
than with any woman that he had known,
but the distance between what he felt somewhere
in the depth of himself and the words he would need
to tell of it here in this woman's presence,
was a distance that he could not hope to bridge,
and so he said nothing. Beneath the porch,
a cricket began to chirr and they both
gave all their attention to it, keeping
their thoughts at bay.
It wasn't that she,
now that the haying was done, couldn't find
and hire some capable hand-- it wasn't
a matter of labor or need-- it was more,
more than she knew how to say, and more
than the circumstance that had led him here
and just as surely would lead him away,
would ever permit.
With his coffee gone,
he started to rise, so she left the swing
and stepped up before him, taking the empty
cup from his hand. He put on his hat
and regarded her for a long moment.
"I'll leave at daybreak." She nodded, but found
there was nothing to say. "I have liked it here,"
he said, and started to say something more,
but then merely tipped the brim of his hat
and turned away toward the barn.
The next morning,
expecting to find him gone, she only
entered the barn to see if, by chance,
he had left anything behind. As she swung
the great door aside she was wholly engulfed
in the redolence of the few hundred bales
they had stacked together. She stood for a time
in the twilit bay till the wagon and bales
and dust-laden rafters resolved from the dusk.
She could tell by the broken twine and scattered
timothy stalks where it was he had slept
and, standing there lost in his absence, she felt
more tired than she had felt since the day
her husband was buried-- and for the first time
in her thirty-eight years she was overcome
with the sense that more of her life had passed
than remained to her.
She emerged from the barn
to the sight of treeless fields stretching out
to a level horizon far to the west
where, just for a moment, a thought carried her,
and she stood there poised on the instant, as though
in expectation of something..., and then,
entrusting the thought to that hidden place
she had long ago made for herself, she turned
once more to the work that awaited her.
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