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167 george f. But teriCk The Walker A dishwasher (this morning), an accountant (the hitchhiker last week), a mail clerk—these are all possible guises, forms for your life away from us, Henry Faith, as your story walks on. I have not the final desire to follow you, an act as decisive to the story-making process as the suicide’s knife. As your story is spun, as the straw is spun into golden bricks (you were to build a house for her, in this version relayed to me this morning as we passed you in the car). She ordered you to build a house for her, and only then (stamping her glass slipper?) would she marry you. You did; she didn’t. You cracked as glass. In this version. A dishwasher, a pearl diver, a caster before swine, if you ask me. You had been a professor at the university. Animal sciences, my source told me, my most “authoritative” source (he shared a room with a man who knew you then), or husbandry, or horticulture. I will check this afternoon the records I have access to, all the faculty records. Or will I, and break this strand in the intricately woven story? Let me sit back and let it spin on, Henry, and on, as you walk on, in every kind of weather. The evident preposterousness of doing it for one woman, even in those more romantic times of thirty-five years ago. There is still the other version. It makes more sense, it appeals to the practical side of us. Your young wife and daughter were killed in an auto accident, perhaps even in a car you had been driving. They say you will accept a ride on occasion, though only from those you know best (who knows you best?). My wife stopped twice, and both times you refused her, mildly, gently, distractedly. You nod the same way when you walk, though you can also direct a nod to friends. You know people, you sight them on your route and recognize them, you allow that much contact. Another story is that you are an accountant at the end of the line in Hartford. You fall off into sums. The “pack” on your back is from crouching over the ledgers, toiling with a stub, uncomplaining Bartleby. It is so unlikely they would tolerate you at the Travelers, traveler, unless it was because they knew the work they could get from a good draft horse such as you yourself could raise in that backyard of yours all overgrown, it needs such trimming a grazing horse could give. Such least possible interruption of your routines. There must be many of them at home, inside those doors; as many, and as simple, as the ones we 168 gArnet poems all know you for. You are famous, Henry Faith, well known in parts hereabouts. People set their watches by you as they did Spinoza. Local color, a local character, even pitied. Every village has its own. I have never heard one person speak disparagingly of you or call you such a thing as idiot, although those punks who beat you, cutting through their own highschool fields to drop you, must have called you such things, and worse. They even came back a second time, to take your clothes. But the story, the stories outstrip them. A woman you were devotedly, desperately in love with stood you up at the altar. Precisely at the altar, fresh in your suit. (Is it cars, or the women who drive them, that you now shun?) It was long ago—after the War. The stories grew. The pack on your back, which is your cares, grew, and the one under your arm is wrapped in plastic or just a paper bag. You come prepared. You are a tailor, and that is the day’s work, to be mended, to be minded. Strips of rags. Your day’s food. A change of clothes, as you step into your accounting suit and off the elevator onto the marble floors of the insurance tower. A mailman (our old mailman knows you). The pack is letters you have brought home and stayed up all night sorting. Letters you hoard at home under your floorboards. Wealth under your floorboards, you wily accountant. Who will you leave it to? How the world will gasp when they read of your will in the next day’s paper. Will you leave it to the university where...

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