The Widder Mercer

I’m holed up in the greenhouse sowing flats of buttercrunch    when she arrives,a ghost from the wild winter light outside the polycarbonate,    her hair disheveledfrom the frantic wind—just as it must have been the night    old Merce felloff the chimney and she walked the four miles to the nearest house,    Reid Ramsey’s,who followed her, back along the path where her footprints,    small as hooves,and the cane’s insistent period were still visible in the snow—    or so they said.She was ancient even then; impossible to think she’d still be there,    scratching at the hard earthout back of the leaning barn that even thirty years ago a swath    of trumpet vinewas pulling to the ground. Impossible, but then I’m in the truck    bouncing over chipand gravel and down into the holler they still call Waverly’s—    her people, not his.They brought the backhoe up and over her flowerbeds and dropped    Merce’s coffinin a man-sized ditch just shy of the porch where he’d been apt to sit    of an eveningsucking tar into his lungs and cussing Ramsey under his breath—    so I knowhe’s still there, but what of the stable, the coop, the buckets of grain,    and that smellof woodsmoke and ham that would hit you when you’d open    the door? Are they?I will say this: 1) crows that believe themselves unobserved    will make the oddest, almost human noises in their corvid throats. 2) The wind that    brought herblew the glowing cedars out all across that little valley. 3)    Branches rosein the headlights and turned away, scraping their antlers on the glass.