JEFF BAKER
Season
Albert Baker, 1921–1993
Dead on arrival at twenty-one—
his memory not the crash
but freezing lost in the woods
finding a trapper’s cabin—
fire roars in the grate but
no one’s home—red fox pelt by
the hearth—
soft, deflated length of the animal stretched
across stones
with its lost eyes watching.
~
Drought pasture and no hay—
they deerpath the ridge at night—
the pinto, her coat gerrymandered
into districts of milk and rust—
the yearling stallion soot-dark
and raw in his architecture—
the mule (who we spot first)
swishing, in a crush of the neighbors’
cabbage, his blonde tail—
bucket of oats to shake them out, then
vault onto grainsacks to keep them at a trot
as we drive—they pull
up to graze in a thin scar of clover
down from the pasture gate—
green strings of slobber blow forth from the worm-work of
the mule’s lower lip—
they won’t come further—I’m ten and follow
directions real good—I run up and swing
out the pasture gate—
plan is, I’ll turn them when they come—
where’s a switch to shoo
them with, but my father’s already swatted the stallion’s hocks
and barks the clutch to juice
the mare and mule bucking to bolt—
muscular galloping panic—
the stallion thrashes his head—ripping
reins from the hands of an invisible rider—
I raise my arms wide—
barrier or martyr—
the stallion’s mane rises away from its crest—
surge of dark strands like particle physics—
~
Outside, a failing tobacco barn—
inside, twelve rows of wooden
bleachers around a clay pit
where men take bets on which bird
will kill the other first—
I’m five years old—it is freezing—cold
toes sting in their grubby boots—
men drink from steel flasks
near a potbellied stove
across the barn—my dad said to sit
right here and don’t move—
I think that was a long time ago.
~
Whoop and shush—whoop and shush—
he’d whipped the pregnant mare into
crossing low ground where three hills
shunted their runoff and she’d keeled
onto her side trapping his leg beneath her
in the bog—the whoop, which frightened
the mare, for someone to find him—
she’d then try to lift her head and right
herself, causing her rounded barrel
to torque against the trapped leg—
therefore, the shush, which calmed
her head back down to the mud.
~
He rested his head on the pelt by the hearth
and felt an unreal warmth—
not on his cold skin but in his chest—
then the sense that once, long ago,
he’d wandered from the woods to this bare room.
He knew if he slept
he would not wake.
~
He bull-bellowed and bucked out
of the barn and galloped in a tight
circle until there was a rough circumference
of blood in the dirt
which he fell into, rolling
onto his back in the center—hoofing
at the air like an equine beetle—
a red wash descending his backside
toward the tail—my father set
the testicles down on the rusted lid
of a feed barrel and we studied them.
~
The mule’s mom was a smooth racking horse
and we’d ride him to show off the flawless gait
he’d inherited. The mule’s dad was an ass.
After the mule balked in a roadside ditch—
trash-water up to his belly until my father beat
him out with a pole—we’d season him before
throwing on the saddle—all morning in plow-
harness, haws and gees turning him to break
the field—then hauling logs felled for pulp
from the woods—then the saddle—salt-lather
of sweat from his withers and steam wavering
from his despairing flanks.
On their last ride,
when my father spurred the mule to the barn,
he broke into gallop and leapt up—hooves tight
and back arched—my father’s face rose to strike
the entry’s overhang and he flipped backwards
from the saddle to fall limp in mud and manure.
The mule trotted to hay without looking back.
~
During the depression
the old folks couldn’t wait to castrate something
so they could roll the balls in meal
and fry them in a skillet popping
with lard and tear famished
at the elastic knit of vesicles—They’d call
them mountain oysters, my father related.
Often, thereafter, I felt
on my person the weight of some eye watching—
eye of some forgotten
ancestor in a flour sack dress scrambling
in a junk shack’s clatterment
to scan through the warped boards
as I passed—her wasp-nest tongue
searching over the toothless comb
of her gums as her spectral eye—
eye that I could almost catch looking
if I whipped around fast—
sized me up.
~
Rub of shut fists cold against his eyes—
my father sits up
in the cabin—faint pulse wicks
on the gurney in the hospital—
my uncle finds him—unsalvageable
body shoved behind
a curtain until the doctor could correct
the time stamp
on death’s paperwork—
he wipes the blackened face he cannot
recognize, he guesses blood
from the smashed head is clotting
in my father’s throat—past
the broken jaw a forced finger
loosens what was blocking the breath—
what if the story cannot
escape the throat—
if no one comes to clear the passage?
~
All night we chase the dogs chasing game.
Youngest, I jog ahead
in the muscadine light—
keep them in earshot as they trail the game
ten times across a cold creek—
the game is smarter than we figure.
Near dawn, sting of sleet in sideways.
My father’s flashlight spots
me locked up and shivering
in brambled thorns back up a muddy
draw.
He untangles me and finds a place away from the wind
and pulls a mockingbird nest
from the dense cover of a cedar’s
branches and puffs the dry twigs and meadow grass
to tinder
and strikes a fire in the hollow
of a rotting feeder log and grows
the heat with brittle limbs broken
from a poplar that failed
to climb beyond the understory.
Dogs come out of the dark—
the game is gone.
They form a warm pack I sit in as sunrise
collapses white arches of ice
lacing the briar-field shut.
~
The army found fault with his feet—
instead of Overlord, flat foot
to the floor of a Ford loaded with moonshine—
dust boiling so thick
pursuit was impossible—
even when they caught him, car crunched
against rock, the evidence was in flames—
that night, on a shelf
in a trapper’s cabin, ink wicked
behind the binding of this book.
When, in an ice storm after a botched hunt,
he told me how he died,
my father mimicked my uncle
mimicking the shock on a nurse’s
face as she saw the dead man
gasp and cough beside a metal pan
where dark blood had thickened
into clots—my first words.
~
My father remembers a road
to the trestle—just there behind
the national park sign
where the mountain kids have learned
to write their names: Triggerscratch & Muzzlefont—
just there
in the 1920s, when he was my age now, and the trestle’s steel
still rested on its concrete monoliths—
half mile up the creek
from its mouth just there—
but this is 1982—summertime,
when a wobbling stream
of RVs blights the park road until
their haul of pale bodies shine
and writhe like larvae in every
good swimming hole—
through the woods the creek back then
struck and parted around
a beautiful flat-rock shoal where
he once spied as a boy just there
a girl swim nude at dusk—
edge around a kudzu curtain and
it is there—from fuller woods
distinct—above us
a crease in the canopy not yet healed
over a vine-tangled alley of post oak and pine—
We’ll have to go home and come back with the saws . . . 