Written by Nancy Dillingham – (Mature theme) –
– I –
Across the road from the house he had built with his own hands which had five bullets embedded in its bedroom ceiling, was the pond, manmade and stocked with fish, but more often used as a swimming hole – especially after he had gone to prison when it became public domain.
In the summers the young boys swam in its murky core, looking with blinded eyes for the gun that he had supposedly thrown there, fantasizing the water clear and bright as glass, reflecting the gun—big, bold, and blue-black—lying on its back on the silty floor. They imagined themselves bringing it to the surface, holding it high above their heads in their wet, young arms, waving it like a flag, shouting, Look, I’ve found it! I’ve found it!
But just as often, as they dove under the water, their arrow-slim bodies splitting the surface like shattering glass, they imagined her, his wife, there, rising from Poseidon’s wide eyes, red hair flowing, calling to them like a Siren in a softly hypnotic voice, her eyes glittering across the watery expanse.
In their nether world between heaven and hell, they floated out of time and into her arms. She held them more tenderly than did all the young girls who walked in the sunlit summer days above on the earth’s surface. They drowned in her.
When he returned a few years later, the young bodies rose out of the water like sleek seals, throwing off her charms like the droplets of water they shook from themselves.
– II –
One day in late summer, enticed by the few dollars offered, some of them were gathered at a neighbor’s field to put up tobacco, when he walked up offering to help. Lined up like brown soldiers, the boys jerked the loaded sticks from the ground and handed them up to him as he stood straddle-legged, balancing all the while on the trailer behind the slow-moving tractor. With great strength, he swung the sticks and slapped them against each other, standing them up in the back of the trailer.
At the barn he got off, climbed up and stood astride two tiers while the boys took turns mounting the trailer and handing the sticks up to him to hang, the others watching with crossed arms from the door of the barn.
The first thing they heard was a sharp, cracking sound as one of the tiers he was standing on began to give away. Then they saw him begin to balance himself. They noticed the small cracks in his black, scuffed boots, the result of having gotten wet and dried out too many times, as he shifted them in an attempt to take some weight off the breaking tier. His arms flailing now, off balance, he used the heavy, loaded stick that he had been in the act of hanging, in a now futile attempt to regain his balance, holding it, acrobat-like, above his head. The man driving the tractor looked dazed, almost asleep. The boy standing on the trailer at the time still held the next stick, poised in the act of handing it up, his eyes widening, a look of astonishment spreading over his face like water. The others stood in the barn door, feet apart, arms folded, a row of brown statues, rooted to the ground.
The next thing they heard was a crash and a sharp cry, then a long, sustained moan, then silence as the dust settled. The broken tier hung down now in two splintered pieces, and they saw him there between them, impaled on the tobacco stick that he had been about to hang, the leaves askew, partly obscuring him. The stalks of the tobacco had slid to the end of the sharpened, wooden stick that was embedded in his chest, giving it force, weighing it down. A blob of purplish blood was seeping down the front of his overalls, some of it staining the brightly golden, curing-out leaves. His head slumped over his chest, he hung there stiffly on the stick, his upper body like that of a scarecrow in the cornfield above them, his legs rubbery, turned at grotesque angles, the shoes looking too heavy now.
– III –
In that first moment of immense silence that followed, the man on the tractor began to move, heavy and uncoordinated at first. Then he was there, the horror reflected in his face. The row of young boys stood there still, apart yet irrevocably joined, feeling the dying man’s pain burning in their hearts, nailing them forever to the spot.
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Writer and educator Nancy Dillingham is a sixth-generation Dillingham from Big Ivy in WNC. Her poems, short stories, and commentary have appeared in various literary journals and newspapers such as Asheville Poetry Review (10th Anniversary Issue), Great Smokies Review (on line–Spring 2011), Parting Gifts (Winter 2010-11), The Arts Journal, Bay Leaves, A Carolina Literary Companion, Half Tones to Jubilee, The Lyricist, Victoria Press, Raleigh News & Observer Sunday Reader, Asheville Citizen-Times, Mountain Xpress, WNC Woman, Weaverville Tribune, and Big Ivy News. She is the author of 8 books of short stories and poems: New Ground (1998); The Ambiguity of Morning (2001); First Light: Poems (2003); Thanks for the Dark but That’s Not Home: Poems and Stories (2006); Colloquy in Black and White: Poems (2009); Home (2010 March Street Press), nominated for 2011 Poetry Book of the Year by Southern Independent Booksellers Alliance; and Americana Rural (2012 Wind Publications). She collaborated on Reflections in a River: Photographs by Joan Medicott and Haiku by Nancy Dillingham (2011 Grateful Steps). She is co-editor, along with Celia Miles of three anthologies: Christmas Presence from 45 WNC Women Writers, Clothes Lines from 75 WNC Women Writers, and Women’s Spaces Women’s Places from 50 WNC Women Writers She also co-edited, with Irene Dillingham Richards and Ken Richards, The Family Named Dillingham: 375 Years in America–1630-2005. Most recently her poetry appeared in Blue Ridge Parkway Celebration, Silver Anniversary Issue and Pine Mountain Sand and Gravel: Contemporary Appalachian Writing.
