Postscript: Return to Hayneville
Yes
Burden and blessing—
two blossoms on the same branch.
To be so lost
in this radiant wilderness.
THE BLESSING
PART ONE
1
Blessing
Do I dare to say my brother’s death was a blessing? Who would recoil first from such a statement? A reader, unsure of its context, but instinctively uneasy with the sentiment? Or me, who knows more of the context than I sometimes think I can bear, having spent most of my life struggling with that death because I caused it? Can I keep my own nerve long enough to work my way through the strangeness of that word?
In French, the verb blesser means “to wound.” In English, “to bless” is to confer spiritual power on someone or something by words or gestures. When children are christened or baptized in some Christian churches, the priest or minister blesses them by sprinkling holy water on their faces. But the modern word has darker, stranger roots. It comes from the Old English bletsian, which meant “to sprinkle with blood” and makes me think of ancient, grim forms of religious sacrifice where blood not water was the liquid possessing supernatural power—makes me remember standing as a boy so close to a scene of violence that the blood of it baptized me.
To wound, to confer spiritual power, to sprinkle with blood. There is something about the intersection of these three meanings that penetrates to the heart of certain violent events of my childhood. I feel as if life itself were trying to reveal some mystery to me by making those three sources meet in my own life.
To wound. To cause blood to flow out of a mortal body. To stand so near that I was spattered with the blood of it. And yet I did not die. Why was I spared? Now that I am in my fifties, I am finally brave enough to ask that aloud, although it is a question that has moved like an underground river below my whole life since that day, moved there with the steady, insistent rhythm of a heartbeat, as if the words themselves made the earth pulse through my feet.
Why was I spared? I’m not sure there is any answer to my question. I know I don’t expect the answer to come from anyone else. I don’t even expect it to come from me. Maybe it’s because I’m a poet and I’ve spent my adult life believing words have the power to reveal what is hidden, but I believe the answer to my question emerges from this odd word itself, this “blessing” that conceals within its history such terrible words as “wound” and “blood.”
2
Guns
There was a ridge above the field. It had been cut clear of trees when a power line went through the year before and now its shrub-grown flank sloped down sharply into the flat grassy field below. It was land we owned, part of the hundred acres of woods and fields that went with the old house my parents had bought two years back. It was Saturday, and we were digging a trench there, with shovels and a pick—my older brother, Bill, and me. It had the rough shape of something sextons might dig in a cemetery, but not nearly so deep. I was a skinny kid and tired easily. Whenever I stopped to catch my breath, I tried to adopt what seemed to me an adult’s pose, resting my chin on my gloved hands folded over the top of the shovel handle and gazing casually out over the field as if there were something there to see, while my heart thumped against the wood handle and my open-mouthed panting made little, spasmodic breath-clouds that held briefly in the still November air.
Late that afternoon, back from his house calls and not yet due for evening hours in the office at the back of our house, Dad trudged up the hill to survey our progress. What he thought meant everything to us, and though it was a job anyone could do, we worried that somehow the trench we’d dug wasn’t good enough. When he climbed down in it, the top hardly came above his shins, and it was too narrow for him to squat without banging his knees. “You’ll have to do better than that,” he said, brushing the dirt from his khaki pants.
Monday would be the first day of deer season. Long before dawn, we three would be crouched there in that same dank trench, each of us holding his own rifle. Bill was fourteen and had a .222; I was twelve and had been given a lightweight .22 for my eleventh birthday. Dad had a 30.06 whose telescopic scope and leather shoulder sling made it seem both more real and more magical than our own guns. It was a vision of ourselves as heroic hunters that kept us digging that weekend, despite the blisters forming under our gloves and the sweat trickling down our ribs as we labored to heave the dirt out of the deepening hole. Jonathan and Peter stood around and watched as Bill and I dug, but they weren’t part of the story. Only ten and eight, they were still kids. Their job was to envy us, who, even with this mundane-seeming