A Prayer for the Dying
“The men tend the shimmering fields. Children tramp the woods, wade the creeks, sound the cool ponds. In town, women pause in the heavy air of the millinery, linger over bolts of yard goods, barrels of clumped flour. The only sound’s the freight drumming through to the south, tossing its plume of cinders above the treetops, the trucks clicking a mile off. Then quiet, the buzz of insects, the breathless afternoon. Cows twitch and flick.
You like it like this, the bright, languid days. It could stand to rain, everyone says, the sawdust piles at the mill dry as powder, the great heaps of slash in the woods dangerous, baked to tinder, but there’s something to the heat, the way it draws waves from tarpaper, stifles sound, closes town in. Winter was full of chimney fires and horses frozen on the plank road, and spring was hard, with the baby, but Marta’s almost back to herself now, her garden thick, tomatoes fist-sized. Except Millie and Elsa Sullivan going at it with their flatware, and Mrs.
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