Nervous Ashers: The Legend of the Silver Jews
by David Berman
There were mountain huts full of smallpox strung out along the hillsides
between Escatawpa and Morgan City, birds boiling up and out of
freestanding
chimneys under the routine advent of rainbows and chainsaws, the old sound
of cheap labour rising and falling in the weather that was like frosted
bank glass and advancing. There were heaps of tangles sawhorses and
tripwire, vacant jasper and wolframite mines, mounds of dead ataris and
scarred desk drawer bibles scattered across the abandoned counties that
lay
inert as rope.
Hazel and Bobby lived together in an old slave shack i used to rent out in
the upper feilds. they cut canadian thistle and picked sloe berries off
the
blackhorn for a living, slashing their hands and bickering all day in the
frayed heat, visiting me in the cool mainhouse most evenings. we'd sit in
the rooms witout ceilings, drinking whitehill whiskey under the
recombinant
stars, and bobby, who loved to go on about things, would reminisce about
his dead wife who had contracted a disease from sleeping too close to the
fan. On sundays they would not move a muscle. They would just sit there
like two piles of coins queitly warming through the afternoon, then slowly
cooling off over the evening.
bobby puts on his sound jacket. shards of hospital bed are locked in the
bass drum. through the worn dolichoid rafters i can see birds flying over
the practice room. the snare is stuffed with traffic tickets and out the
window there's my horse walking on the stream, the stream always behind
schedule. there's a dust mote hawk landing in slo-mo on my guitar.
hazel's
saying something about earnest wourls over in tullahoma who'd had a dream
about being a cougar sleepwalking on polk's grave and hhow that was
badluck
for the region. ("those that look through the window are darkened." All
those faces passed down through the centuries that kickstart the rivers
and
grow like nerve endings in a coal cart until until they are key-cold and
shoved through the repaired death gate, a catafalque set free and released
into the dirtways.) "And john and his father trap mink under the chain
lightning in the libraries they've landed in, where all the talk about
shadow-dappled paths is typeset, published, and poured into a break in the
earth," hazel murmured to no one in the room. you might think it was all
words and dark ticket as we began to play "R.M.T." in the swarming weather
chart sundown, and it was.
Outside, you'd would still hear the music, hear someone yelling "actors
dreaming got nowhere to stay/ see my sheet go walking run and fly" and it
would sound better from far away, like the faded sketch of a long since
forgotten pacer at the downs, all the while platinum ticks are dropping
off
the trees like little romans, onto an auburn shower curtain half-buried
in
the forest floor.
already gone were the golden days of e-z credit, the days of approaching
squat south-central skylines from underneath the ice blue tides of the
windshield, the five cent war comets, howling saran yaps and careening
school chords. all that was left, looking like two lost eyeballs on the
feild after spotsylvania, were a couple of black plastic busted knobs in
the dirt, one for tone and one for rinse.
this place is like a haunted turnpike, closed down for years , where
things still happen in the little turnoffs to the renowned teenagers that
never
come back (sold to the haunt in the black church). if you come in the day
and you're lucky, you might catch a picture of two sweatbees fucking on a
coke mirror. you might see my horse breaking across a white wine coloured
clearin, or maybe hear the old chords coming, for no real reason, out of
sockets in the walls. ("because there's an answering machine clogged with
ice, deep in the courthouse mountains where he lived and died in the
breech.")
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