Bell Bottom Blues

the day before i buried you

i took the road in lonesome treading

on bare'd blue byway sinking

where late the choir'd swallows

           soft singing

burdened silent footing.

                                   so why dost thou cry aloud

                                   is there no king in thee?

                                   heart ridden soul,

                                   wherefore dost thy trouble not leave?

oh, stay! please do not abandon me

memory's waiting on a half-emptied street--

a lonely mermaid who knells a surf tormented dream

do i dare turn back

do i dare disturb this street?

or do i lonesome with you

           on your whited sepulcher

shall i weep beneath this tree?

                                   you needn't to cry

                                   you needn't to cry, Darl

                                   the red earth's hinged beneath.

but do i dare

oh do i dare

do i set this body        free?

and if i do

           ( remember me

            will i remember you? )

will you wake unto a thunderclap

unto a lighted homesick'd meadow

or suspended in your ache-torn limbo

will you dim a sigh-worn echo?

and the day after i buried you

i took the road in peaceful treading

gentle unto gentle footing

where silent my bittersweet'd tears bled a quiet morning

           hush

the choir'd birds soft singing

                                   if i forget thee, o jerusalem

                                   least know that i've loved thee

                                   and in parting

                                   each to each

                                   thou art now free   



July. Pulma.

By morning, Carrie was dead, laying on the bed like a quaintly-set monument, straight as a plumb line and so pleasantly recumbent that Frank did not know yet she was dead, only sitting there thinking she is so beautiful, why, she is gorgeous, if only I could remember her like that forever, if only this moment could endure until time itself has withered away, thinking, 'For me to suffer him dreaming like that while I am dead, and he don't even know it yet,' aching there in waiting while he dressed--white contrast shirt, black serge trousers, pinstripe socks--why I done ironed them yesterday already, and still I am a-laying here, full of waiting, emptied of life, until he humming-n-smiling like an asinine dope, crossing the bed to kiss me good morning, so close that his breathing whispers over my not breathing, so close that I might as well have told him myself through the terrific limpidness of my solemn surrender and wistful shame             as if life itself were a ring I had lost to a wind-shaken, surf-tormented shore with me in it looking and searching and fretting between the reeling waves of foam and sand and viscid snails from dusk til dawn until, as if to say, finally, quite breathlessly                 'I am dead. I am dead, Frank. Now stop humming like a fool.'

He must have heard, I suppose, but I guess the remembering comes before knowing and knowing before crying because with him standing there agape, dangle-armed, reluctant to countenance what he knows already, as if staring and fuddling itself would make me forget I was dead, and so his standing there thinking when we bought this house in Pulma 27 years ago I told him lovingly in the backyard, 'When I die, I want you to bury me back there, between the poplar and the elm.'

'How?' He said.

'Why, with a shovel, of course.'

And he laughed because he did not believe me.

'Won't you want a funeral?' He said, 'with a coffin and a priest and a procession and such?'

'No, I want you to bury me yourself, even though it'll take a shovel and a right smart 'mount of digging and sweating. But, will you do that for me, Frank?'

'Carrie . . .'

'Won't you do that for me, Frank?'

'It'll be cold down there.'

'I know.'

'And clammy.'

'I know.'

'And there's them earthworms and maggots and snakes and such.'

'I know.'

'They'll be crawling over you, and gobbling up your intestines, and you wouldn't be able to do anything about it.'

'God will see to it,' I said and he asked me, 'Why do you even want me bury you anyways? Wouldn't it be nicer to be . . . to be with them other dead folks?'

So, I said, 'I want you to bury me because then you can remember me always, and then I will be with you forever, and then I will not be dead'

Then, I knew without him saying so that he would do it. He would do it because he was scared, and if he buried me then he would not be scared. That is why I could not help myself asking, 'Why are you crying? Why are you crying, Frank?' And it was the sweetest, the most saddest thing I ever heard.

'I am crying because you are dead,' he said.

'I am,' I said, 'will you bury me now?'

But I could not say it. I could not shape the words because it was the queerest thing I ever saw: her laying there, gently supine, so delicate and so precious in the likeness of the Virgin Mary herself that I could not recognize her no more. And when I tried to remember Carrie from last week or Carrie from yesterday, Carrie supping whiskey at a rodeo or Carrie standing 5'4'' in a flower-pleated skirt and cinnamon colored stockings, they all became Carrie like the Virgin Mary, Carrie like a saint; and even when I brooded over our wedding day, she was there in July dappled moonlight betwixt the poplar and the elm, laying on the bed in her bridal gown like a painted statue full of restless and implacable waiting, until I thought to myself, believing it because I remembered it so, 'Perhaps she has always looked like this.'

So, I told her, 'You are a strange woman.'

And when she was finally done dressing herself for the funeral, attired in blue bell bottoms and red saddle oxfords, I realized that I could not lift her even though she was frail and drawn beneath the fabric, like a shingled roof sagging in steady and dilapidated fatigue, that when I took her by the armpits, hugging her by the chest to heave her body out of the bed, she suddenly became an extraordinary burden too heavy that I could not carry her without stumbling even though there was no depression or indentation where she had lain. And when my arms could bear her no longer I realized without my knowing it that I also could not put her down, as if it was not so much the commencing and picking up that was exhausting as the stopping and letting go.

'You are a strange woman,' I said.

So I took her clothes off again, folding them neatly under my arm without it wrinkling and wrapped her tight in the bedspread, stark naked, so I could drag her to the back where she was to be buried. So, it was through the kitchen, out the back door, down the rear steps, and over the patio that we mounted the red dirt path with her head-first, unclothed, betwixt the sheets and me squatting backways on two feet straddling both sides pulling one two, one two, one two, and watching the furrow unspool at her heels up the hill where we can see lilacs and asters growing implacably between poplar and elm, full of waiting, empty of her, under the abject nakedness of that July sun. When we crested the hill and it was still up there and when I unfurled the soiled sheets to let her breathe, I see that she is filthy, caked all over in red dust so that I must to run back for a wet towel and a pail of water. She is wiped until she is unstained. Then I dress her in those blue bell bottoms and red saddle oxfords with her hair fanned beneath like a frocked petticoat, sun dappled, rasping undulations across her face so that she looks just like the Virgin Mary. And then I could not help it. No matter how I tried, I simply could not help it. It came all at once, without warning, the sharp biting growing bitter in the nose and the hot stinging building harsh beneath my eyes, I could not hold it back, thinking, 'I do not recognize her. She is dead. She is dead and I cannot even remember what she looked like yesterday.'

It was the sweetest, most saddest thing I ever saw, like I knew it without needing him to say so, believing it before knowing and knowing before ever seeing. It is as if memory starts to forget when knowing stops, stopping without realizing that the dead are entombed in the past, never to be disinterred because they cease to exist both in living and in remembering. Many a time, when I lay with him beneath a lonely roof, I puzzled with the reminiscing and dwelt interminably inside the remembering until it came instantaneously, without portent, like an inexorable deluge roaring past in inscrutable oblongs and sounds and colors too fast for even thought, that memory becomes a dream, like looking in a mirror at a tapestry veiled behind Venetian blinds, fluttering up and down and up and down at once diaphanous, discombobulating, and articulate without fault, because the portrait, a vista of a distant sea, is not seen in the mirror, but in the imagining, the abstract, without words to shape its being, its nothingness so that I am not there but here, standing before the tapestry, knowing without seeing that distant July beach in lilting waves bearing salty wrinkles through the air and whitecaps foaming ephemerally, chimerically between my feet so that I can believe without the need to think that memory troubles itself not with facts because it is burdened ponderously so, adamantly so, with truth. That is why I am thinking, 'If he just would. Lord, if he just would. Then I would not be a fixture but a constituent of truth.'

Then, I can listen to him speak, sculpting out of the darkness dimly lit words and redolent silhouettes, recalling a dread, a nightmare plaguing his spirit because he is afraid of forgetting, afraid of dying, an old terror so long sustained that I suppose he can even bear it now, or perhaps he has forgotten why he was ever afraid in the first place. So, he tells me about his forgetting, the county fair, the striped tents against the mauve, lilac, pastel-textured opalescence of summer twilight where pale stars slowly percolate through the grading sky and the warm-smelling of caramel, popcorn, sausages, and mustard, about how he remembers the musty horses snorting, stamping, eyes a-rolling, but he cannot remember me. You were wearing them blue bell bottom jeans and red saddle oxfords, he said, then he would take from the bedside drawer a carefully framed picture where, amid the striped tents, fading twilight, stamping horses, and the warm-smelling of caramel popcorn I, young, coy, mysterious, blush in a flower-pleated skirt with cinnamon colored stockings, and he would sigh because that was not right, that was not how he remembered it. So, I would say perhaps it don't matter what I wore, perhaps it don't matter because memory don't care for facts. That is not right, he would say, that is not right at all. And I suppose it is because knowing cannot accept what memory does not believe and if remembering is estranged so from knowing then what has one ever believed? Aging is like growing up but upside over, he said, because we cannot countenance it any other way, and I reckon he is right, for a bystander will always see a baby as he saw it the first time no matter how much it has matured, and the same fellow will see an old man always as he is now, no matter how juvenile and lively he once was. It is as if the young and the senile are both immortal, he would say, with one never aging and the other ever changing, bereft of any in between. And if that is so, how can we remember anything correctly?

It is finished now, vacant, fastidious, and immovable in the languorous air cadenced to a standstill with the last, flat, rhythmic chuck, chuck, chuck of pig iron on red earth, dimpled with dark sweat, full of restless waiting, empty of her. Then, I hear a yipping behind me. I turn and she is laying there with a coyote sniffing and yipping and guzzling at her cheek. 

'God damn son of a bitch,' I say, throwing the shovel at the coyote, missing, sending a plume of dust next to where she is and the coyote whimpering away, yipping and whinnying until I chase it down the hill where he is past the house. I go back. She is still there, not like the Virgin Mary, but like a corpse with the left side of her cheek bitten off so that it is gushing red, yellow, and white molasses-like in the dust where I can see her tongue rolling out of her mouth.

'God damn son of a bitch,' I say and it is as if I cannot even remember what the Virgin Mary looked like, replaced instead by that grotesque mastication, and me thinking Carrie at the rodeo without a cheek, Carrie at the wedding with her tongue rolling out of her mouth. That is when I realized I could not do it, I could not bury her, believing, 'She is real. At least, she is real now. And if she is covered up, she will be lost forever. She will be dead,' as if one's remembering isn't so much the knowing as the looking and constantly reminding until one can finally believe the past really happened, wherein they forget immediately once the future is past again. Thinking that if he were given albums unto volumes of inexhaustible time, the past captured live, the present bound mid-action he would say that is not right, that is not right at all because Carrie's tongue is rolling out of her mouth. And for that, perhaps, Carrie without a cheek is better than Carrie not at all.

Then I saw that she was crying, her tears blinking iridescent in the July sun as if it was not crying but her soul bleeding, so that I could not help myself asking, 'Why are you crying? Why are you crying, Carrie?'

'Because you are here now and I am still full of waiting,' she says.

'I cannot help it,' I say, 'I cannot pick you up for I will not be able to put you down again. I cannot help it.'

'Then lie here with me,' she says, so I do, next to the emptying and the waiting, under the poplar and the elm.

'I am afraid,' I say.

'I know' she says, 'but are there are some things beyond even believing or remembering, that cannot be forgotten because they never change.'

And he did not believe me. So, I said, 'When I was dying, I was drifting, like a nightmare, dark, cold, empty, devoid of any feeling. And I realized that I could not remember a single thing. It was like my whole life was there, condensed in a singular darkness, flitting through and through in oblongs and shapes and colors but I could not remember a single thing. Then, I heard you crying, sniveling and grieving like a fool while I thought, Why, that is the sweetest most saddest thing I ever saw, if only I could remember this feeling forever, if only this moment could endure until time itself has withered away. Then I knew I did not have to, I knew it without thought because my smiling and my crying was not fact it is was truth. Then, I knew it would prevail, that you would be with me always because universal verities can never fade.'

I hear him turn towards me, where my cheek is running, steadily, molasses-like. I feel his breathing, so close that it whispers over my not breathing.

'You were so pretty that day, at the county fair,' he says, stops, hesitates, then, 'I was so happy.' So, I knew without thought without hearing that he understood, that he had finally let me go, that I was now free.

Many a night I lay there, under the poplar and the elm, atop the emptying that is now full, beneath her gentle caressing. It is as if I can see her, fleshed out of darkness and of sound, of the spangled night sky and the wind drooping with redolent lilacs and scented asters, but I know she is not that. She is not Carrie like the Virgin Mary, Carrie in red saddle oxfords. She is not Carrie without a cheek or Carrie in the ground, because when memory believes and knowing remembers, she is shapeless, she is formless. She is pain, she is sorrow, she is joy. She is laughter and tears and she is eternal.

And so I say, ‘You are a strange woman.’