In the Kingdom of the Ditch

Three Songs for Flannery O’Connor

66 Three Songs for Flannery O’Connor i. the girl who taught a chicken to walk backwards Mostly she loved hens whose necks grew too long, curved like gourds, crooked combs that toppled over the sides of their docile heads. At school when she was bored she stared at the boy with the wrecked chest, whispered in his spoon-shaped ears that it was easy to catch a hen and teach it to walk backwards, strutting, even dancing with an oblong gait. After the boy’s grandpap ran over his leg, drunk and backing down the drive, he walked with crutches, later with a limp. In Ripley’s she’d read of a rooster who lived thirty days with its head cut clean off. She told him she worried about that chicken’s sorrow, its grief at not being able to peck. She supposed the boy had to hide his secrets, like a hatchet’s head buried in a stump. Eventually all birds were beheaded: the family’s cook grabbing the flightless bodies, thrusting them into boiling water, then plucking, plucking, plucking. Whenever the boy tried to speak it sounded like a hen’s clucking beneath his peach moustache, which was the same color as the sky at dawn when she coaxed her hens with meal, even molasses. Instead of letting the birds aimlessly scratch, she’d shove her hands into apron pockets, thrust her head forward, and march straight as a newly plowed furrow, her stride narrow as the path to heaven. Upon her approach what chicken wouldn’t take a step back? The day the news crew arrived to film the bird the boy came riding on his bike: hair standing up 67 like wind in a coxen comb, sternum like a chicken’s breast sticking out from under his white-pressed shirt. She took his hand because she already understood at some point we must take a step backwards to see whether we’re frying in the fat of our sins, or whether love, when we try to own it, must become beautifully misshapen. ii. noodling blues At the bottom of the river, arm under the belly of the bank, water cuts away sycamore roots and his hand slides easily into the channel cat’s mouth, until it realizes he is the bait and the hook, then swings its tail along the river’s bed, reeling silt, water little more than mud, what was murky made blacker, and what he thought he held now holding him down, shaking the last of the breath left in his chest, which he tries to hang onto until the other two in the boat take the long hook to the fish, bring it caterwauling over the bow, his hand still half way down the gullet and all of them wrestling the river’s current, grabbing at air and water, gasping in a howl, the three of them gaping at what’s written across the fish’s face just after the hammer crushes its skull. 68 iii. in the backseat The warmth of the girl’s inner parts, the place her momma says the Holy Ghost resides, is wet, and this boy who kisses her with his mouth thrown open, as if he were about to laugh, has his hands inside her blouse, nearly inside her heart. She wonders if as he raises her skirt, as he tosses her legs up high against his shoulders, if God’s own spirit will come flying out, never to return; if all she’ll be left with is what her biology teacher calls genitals; if when she pees in the outhouse the flies will know the difference. ...