Читать книгу Uneven Ground - Ronald D Eller - Страница 9

The way the Brier remembers it, folks weren’t sure

at first what was coming. The air felt strange,

and smelled of blasting powder, carbide, diesel fumes.

A hen crowed and a witty prophecied

eight lanes of fogged-in asphalt filled with headlights.

Most people hadn’t gone to bed that evening,

believing an awful storm was coming to the mountains.

And come it did. At first, the Brier remembers,

it sounded like a train whistle far off in the night.

They felt it shake the ground as it came roaring.

Then it was big trucks roaring down an interstate,

a singing like a circle saw in oak,

a roil of every kind of noise, factory

whistles, cows bellowing, a caravan

of camper trucks bearing down

blowing their horns and playing loud tapedecks.

He recollects it followed creeks and roadbeds

and when it hit, it blew the tops off houses,

shook people out of bed, exposing them

to a sudden black sky wide as eight lanes of asphalt,

and dropped a hail of beer cans, buckets

and bottles clattering on their sleepy heads.

Children were sucked up and never seen again.

The Brier remembers the sky full of trucks

and flying radios, bicycles and tv sets, whirling

log chains, red wagons, new shoes and tangerines.

Others told him they saw it coming like a wave

of tumbling dirt and rocks and carbodies

rolling before the blade of a bulldozer,

saw it pass on by, leaving a wake

of singing commercials, leaving ditches

full of spray cans and junk cars, canned

biscuit containers, tinfoil pie plates.

Some told him it felt like a flooding creek

that leaves ribbons of polyethylene

hanging from willow trees along the bank

and rusty cardoors half silted over on sandbars.

It was that storm that dropped beat-up cars

all up and down the hollers, out in fields

just like a tornado that tears tin sheets

off tops of barns and drapes them like scarves

on trees in quiet fields two miles from any settlement.

And that’s why now so many old barn doors

up and down the mountains hang by one hinge

and gravel in the creek is broken glass.

That’s how the Brier remembers America coming

to the mountains. He was just a little feller

but he recollects how his Mama got

all of the younguns out of bed, recalls

being scared of the dark and the coming roar

and trying to put both feet into one leg

of his overalls.

They left the mountains fast

and lived in Is, Illinois, for a while

but found it dull country and moved back.

The Brier has lived in As If, Kentucky, ever since.