Gabriel GuddingThe Pallbearer Races
It is morning in late summer. I am moving in the yard at the Church of Our Redeemer, which hangs at the hems of two flax farms, a mile on the highway from the edge of Flom. Near the picket gate, in the weeds grown up into the chipped paint, our family's disinterred rest there with the flies, beside my comely aunts gussied in pitch. Their cheeks are gemmed with tears lit pink in the coming sun, itself lately exhumed and fresh as Christ: today the pallbearer heats at Our Redeemer church. And I, by God, am taking bets. Every ten years we've dug them up and the men of the family have grunted them to the edge of Thompsen's shorn field and back, in a race whose purpose is, for a day at least, to give our grief a shallow grave. And though a year gone and mostly bone, little Tom will race today, carried by James and Jake and Bill and Dave and John-- and one other whom I don't know. He'll do fine. They slide him now from the Fleetwood's bed, shoulder him with a huff, and walk-- his aggregate clicking in the box. The last hearse arrives popping over the gravel. The churchyard pauses while we put Raymond near the gate. The wind bellies thick in the shadows near my aunts, as one of Ray's sisters begins to keen and another to ululate. And beyond the headstones, as if remembering the days when she could run an old mother toes the starting line at the back of the churchyard lawn. I shall root for Tom.Foundry
The great brass bell was dragging itself across a landscape mottled with parks and cricks and creased with old asphalt roads, its swollen clacker pathetically donking against fire hydrants and curbs. What had sent it packing? Was it going home? Fleeing a fired past? Who had freed it from its weather-wracked, hulking cross-stays? Once, the bell was caught in bracken like a large smooth bug in tar, a wheezing dog came fumbling, oddly didn't pee, just lay down beneath it and died. That smell of dog lingered in the bell's clacker swivel, repulsing cats for some time. The winters were the worst; its big tired mouth dragging across the dirty snow like an early morning kiss. Then, struck by a dump truck, it tottered on its lip for a moment. Until, like a humpbacked penny, it began that addled circuitous fall common to all coins, and lay still. The bell was paralyzed. It wasn't until dark and bluest winter that the shadow of a steeple was able to reach the bell, giving one reassuring stroke each day--until evil spring beat back the steeple's soft, compassionate arm.
Gabriel Gudding is an assistant professor of English at Illinois State University. His book, A Defense of Poetry, will be published this November by the University of Pittsburgh Press. The book's title poem is included in the Scribner anthology Great American Prose Poems: From Poe to the Present, edited by David Lehman and forth-coming this April.
