Читать книгу One Man's Dark - Maurice Manning - Страница 9

THE GLASS EYE

Freddie Terry would take it out

and blow on it like an ember to fog

it over, and then he’d polish it

slowly on his shirttail

before setting it back in the little cave

above his cheek where it peered out

shinier now and bluer than

the good one, and when it caught the light

it flickered as if it were coming to life.

He lived with two or three brothers

in a railroad rooming house.

I’ve seen them dancing on the porch,

unbelievable as ghosts —

barefoot in overalls,

and one of them would plink and pluck

a banjo, forgoing melody

for the more mysterious sense of sound.

That house is years away in time —

it was said the brothers shared a wife.

By the end, though, they lived in public housing

without a porch and kept indoors.

Now all of them are gone from the earth.

There was no skill in the work we did,

the work, at least, didn’t ask it —

clattering down through the warehouse

with iron-wheeled ancient carts

to drag them loaded back to the dock

where the only twentieth-century fact —

a straight-box truck — waited

for loading. We’d do it again and again

until all seven trucks were gone

to the country stores which now themselves

are gone: Bottoms’s, Pottsville, Jennings’s,

Craintown, Redtop,

even the little towns have gone.

But some of the men gave skill to the work,

simply by enjoying it,

the rhythm and repetition, and then

they’d interrupt it. Freddie would take

it out around midday and squint

with his good one through the glass and say,

let’s see if I see dinnertime,

and then in the afternoon he’d fish

it out again and say, I believe

I see it, five o’clock! — holding

the eye before him like a lantern,

as though he were leading us from darkness.