Summer Rain

For Ron Rash

The second Sunday in July marks homecoming at Pine Grove Freewill Baptist, celebrated not with football and marching bands, but dinners on the ground among our departed and a background of good gospel music, down home food, and talk of recipes, quilts and bloodlines.

After a pooling of memory, my great aunts send me to the old cemetery where my great-great grandfather rests under odd knob of quartz in a portion of graves marked with crude stones beneath a row of ancient oaks that whisper and jostle in the breeze.

Out of the shade, in the heat of the new grounds marked with flat bronzes, silk flowers and American flags, I see the stir and bob of balloons, walk to where they lift and settle, a chain of them, a card tied to the string to trace flight, attract friends in far flung places.

I stoop to retrieve the card, stub my toe upon my youth, see the carved name of love that tasted of lake water and Juicy Fruit on a blanket weighted with battered Keds and penny loafers. A scratchy transistor soundtrack of Dock of the Bay and Summer Rain, hourly newscasts of Chicago riots, assassinations of hope, Hanoi, Haiphong, the burning of draft cards like the new one in his pocket, all made me believe in nothing but green eyes with little boy lashes, summer freckled skin, smooth honeysuckle nights by the river with rain on the car roof.

He suffered awful in his mind, the aunties recall, like so many that went over there. They detail his end while we repack the bounty under rumbling threats. I promise to replace the fieldstone with one that named my ancestor.

Rain lashes the windshield as I tune in the Oldies and Forever Young knifes my heart. I retrieve the balloon card from my pocket and drive toward the post office drop box to obey the careful crayon message “send me back.”