Voices, Traces, the Whip-poor-will's Plea

The voice in the treeline votes to punish:
whippoorwill, he repeats. Wisteria
vines tendril a green lash. A story
has brought me to the sleeping porch
watching moonrise, working my rocker
to help me remember. By this thought
I am stricken, the tongue coming back
to a chipped tooth: his name was Will.

They came on horses, as in the old days,
their cloaks sewn from cotton sheets,
their wizard caps, the battleflag
from someone's parlor where lemonade
mixed with whiskey. The woman in question
was no spinster but a known coquette,
prone to gin and cheroots. It didn't
matter. He was nightwalking, and black.

I have seen the tree where they roped him,
its limbs empty even in high summer.
They say it never grew again but cannot
ever die. The garden lanterns and light
from the cruising moon specter sweet
abelia, myrtle, heliotrope. The flag
I was raised to love takes its colors
from blood and new bruise and bone.

They bore it as a claim to old order,
romance and historical glory, an ardor,
I suppose. Much of the tale remains
a mystery, why the woman was awake
to see Will drifting down her road, how
she was able to name his face. Firefly
sparks are all I can make out beyond
the roses. In the story they were sober.

Almost. I have seen the cool room where
the Stars and Bars still frays behind
the knife-gouged counter of Horton's Store.
The juice harp twanging, slap jack, co-colas
and jokes. I have dangled my legs over
the drink box, kicking tin as I laughed.
I have heard one cousin offer his cracker
wisdom: if Lee had won, even the crickets

in this county would be lily white. The whip
cut a cross into Will's skin. It took
me years--past the ball field rebel yells
and Shiloh visits--to feel the shame.
Will was a man with a wife and daughters.
He mended sprung looms at the towel mill
and went to Baptist meeting. None of that
mattered in moonlight. One torch, another.

That fire chills me even in August heat.
Trussed with leather traces, he writhed,
his voice a drilling cry. They tossed a chain
across a low limb. It must have looked
like lightning, the sudden flare of kerosene.
I am cringing in my chair's wicker seat.
The runners creak. The night bird has flown.
Their hunting horns like bugles woke

the hounds. Their scrawled note said Never
surrender. From nearby windows sleepy
farmers said they saw riders and the flag.
A judge with the camelia tattoo under
his robes found, "Misadventure, strangers,
wild people not our own," and I rock out
a tune on the porch boards, "Not us, not us,"
as the owl whoos his hungry question.

Grandmother's brother, showing his white
face at graveside, stepped forward after
the hymn to say, "He was a man without
a trace of shame. We'll miss him at the looms."
He offered the widow a shroud of banners
some uncle saved from Appomattox.
"What this used to mean no longer matters.
Take it, please, and put it in the ground."

R.T. Smith, editor of Shenandoah, is the author of several books of poetry and short stories, including Trespasser, Split the Lark: Selected Poems, Messenger, and Faith. He lives in Rockbridge County, Virginia.

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