The Wild Wind

Excerpt

Dearest Sam,

When the spider in the corner dropped down, not once, but three times, I knew I shall die in the same old farmhouse of which I was born. My only hope, they find me in such good grace as I had you, as my eyes will surely sink far into the back of my skull in no time at all. I’ve made sure to leave the old farmhouse clean and orderly, having dusting and polishing the grandfather clock long facing the wall. The floorboards, an 88-key piano beneath my feet as I mopped about. I’ve tidied everything, save the last room down the hall to the left, where I keep my room hoarded with books and casefiles—a tomb of tales so to speak. My old Remington typewriter sits under the window overlooking the Hilltop—the skin of my fingers peeled off on the keys in layers of grime—where with good eyes one can see the old tombstones rising helter-skelter amongst the graveyard elm on the horizon. A denim quilt, stitched of Pa's old overalls, lies draped upon my bed. On a small nightstand, a photo of myself, but a girl sat on the porch steps in a flowered dress, chin in my palms, soles of my shiny black shoes together in prayer. A lone crow lurks about the lawn. I wear a look on my face, neither here nor rather, eyes remembering far-off patients plucking petals from the flowers one by one as I remind myself, what a pity to be sane in such a wonderful garden of madness. To the left of the Remington lies stacked three of your favorite books Sam, The Iliad, Romeo and Juliet, and a one missing its cover, which I’d prefer to remain private—a pressed rose in its back cover. To the right, a pile of words pounded out on wilting paper. All I’d exhaled for you Sam, a last breath so to speak, a rather slow death wrapped up in those sheets, letters I’d pounded out in such grime, as to offer you my last words, or my first, I can hardly tell by this, but as you always used to say Sam: “The end is merely the beginning.” Now, when the moon rises, I’ll walk in one circle and spin the chair about one leg, then I’ll swallow the whole damn bottle of yellow ones, oval, I’ve come so accustomed to—turn the horseshoe nail ring round and round my finger, and then with any luck I’ll drift off with grace and sleep the sleep of the dead. I have no regrets, I’ve indeed lived a long life, nearly an American century in fact, and, that long dusty road I’d walked alone for so long now, scuffing my tiny feet along, feet never to grow with my withered age, with only my breath to accompany me, I’ll pick up one last twist, as I had along the way, like that old tree along the ravine, the one they found Momma hanging from. Anyhow, may they call it a blessing, may they call it a curse—all I know is no one ever tells you how awfully long it is to be old. And, come to think of it, in all my years, I’d only stepped foot beyond the Mississippi but once, to the St. Louis World’s Fair in the autumn of 1904, I was four years old, and Doctor Zeller offered to let you accompany. But Momma, Pa and I went alone. I remember eating ice cream in a cone and riding a Ferris Wheel round and round up into the heavens and back down again—but surely, I told you all about it many times before—how devastating it was to drop back to a world where one must remember to leave a house through the same door one arrived—where one must never enter a home with a troubled past, or wear another’s clothes, or walk in one shoe, or brush your hair too often before bed. And God forbid someone takes a lock and drops it in a stream, running the mind mad as is this garden blossoming with madness. When the hoodoo is around Sam, I to this day slept with one eye open, and as it raps freely upon the door, high or low, to snatch mr by the tail feathers and split my tongue in two, I remember your warning: “Sanity is but paper in a world consumed by fire.” Makes me ponder—what a strange thing the Gods rounded this ball of clay in the palm of their hands, ensuring to look forward is to look back again. And back I have looked Sam, deep into that long and many long nights. And what I saw, the most perilous decision, that again, and again, the clouds will continually turn on the western front. I looked all the way back to the great civic awakening, that time long past, long obscured by the growing pains of this once great nation, and those godawful wars. These days Sam, the Bronson, its mammoth limestone blocks, once the epitome of timelessness, sits choked in vines, a straitjacket of time if you will. Its windows, shattered like the minds that once lived within, shattered by the angst that is puberty, and the madness of this lost generation. The magnificent balconies overlooking the dried-up pond have collapsed with old age and senility, as they’d forgotten how to stand on their own. And, more often than not, the blue skies seem an endless winter gray as my cataracts have dulled the light in my waning years. Doctor Zellers garden, I hate to say it, is long overgrown with weeds—rose peddles withered decades ago and blown away with the ashes of his memory. The graveyard, well with each spring rain, the tombstones further erode and slip into the ravine, bones long turned to dust, yet the Graveyard Elm, well it still stands tall and whispers away, never ceasing to remind me of Old Book. Sometimes when the branches catch the right wind, I still hear him wailing away. A four-lane highway now runs north to Grandview. In only a matter of years, industry grew too big for its britches, inviting all sorts of unbridled activity within proximity to the great river. There was a time Grandview was even dubbed the whiskey capital of the world, can you believe it? Those puritans embracing a wide-open town, up for grabs by grubby businessmen and gangsters in their pinstripe suits alike. Yet, seemingly in not time, the prospectors fled and rust crept to the city's edge and inevitably to its heart, where its soul quickly decayed, leaving this post-industrial wasteland in its wake, which has begun to washup at the base of the hilltop. Not much is left now to feast upon, rusty smokestacks, a large stretch of marrowless bones and bricks laying before an enormous plain of great corporate farms stretching beyond a brown layer of smog and dust, foothills of purple cumulus clouds running north to south as the river flows, have lost their sheen, but the muddy conveyor belt flows on, barges day and night, keeping the heart of America on life support, in these final days I suppose. Oh, how I miss watching the patients play donkey ball on the lawn, relaxing in the garden, shaking their heads left and right, shaking the hands, slapping their own faces, pulling the hair, sticking the tongue, shaking the finger, clapping the hands, hugging the self, singing to the self, crying, lying, and laughing, and cooling off in the shade of the Graveyard Elm. Oh, how I miss you, Sam. Over the years, I’ve watched the honking geese on their great migration come and go and come and go again, as the dear old river flows onward, never revealing the reason it swallows whom or what it does, carrying our secrets off to the sea. Yet when those sparrow hawks swoop down upon the Hilltop, bending and twisting and turning through the pony grass, through the tombstones, about the whispering leaves, will forever blow a wild wind. Tonight, Sam, I plan to catch the right wind, and ride that chariot high, and never look back toward the garden again.

Yours Truly,

Sarah

S.W.A.K