New Covenant Bound

Prayer

70 Prayer There where my breath enters the darkness and I cannot yet follow you who are lost await me with your signal lanterns your pitchers of milk on the opposite shore where you gather thorns to feed your watchfires scattered across the snowy fields where you kneel at the water washing the clay from your hands. You who are nothing nothing but the earth once touched and made holy children of dust once raised to the light — there you have done my starving for me there you eat the salt crust of your longing and are filled. And what news of my journey will I bring you in return what scarred memory 71 of the last hour before I cross over to you — a rain crow lighting on a gate October wind harping on the fencewire? blue dragonfly the delicate stained glass webs of its wings lifting from the footprint I leave as I step into my boat? Until that day the earth shall free me and you gather me there to you beneath the witness tree to shelter me against the wilderness you who have suffered the wanderings of your children watch over me here where I seek my comfort on this stony ground covering myself with darkness here where I wait for the light 72 to open and receive me here where I pray — come down now to lie near me to warm yourselves at my fire. 73 " After all was said and done, the thing I worried about most after we got to New Covenant was keeping the family together. Your father was the only one of the three I ever feared would leave us. When he was little more than a good-sized boy, he’d walk the mile or so down to the hard road of an evening, just to sit and see if any car lights would pass by. And after we had been in New Covenant a while, he took to sitting by himself down at the station platform, just watching the trains come and go. I was always afraid he had some kind of itch in his feet. And without the farm, there was just nothing to keep a grown boy occupied. There was surely nothing to keep him in New Covenant, nothing but the movie house and the pool hall. So it wasn’t much of a surprise when he came in one morning and said he was going downtown to sign up with the Navy. It wasn’t a surprise, but it was still the second hardest thing I ever did, standing there on the front steps a month later, watching them pull away, him and his brother leaving for Hopkinsville, where he was to catch a train to Nashville and on to Norfolk, Virginia. I just kept wondering, after everything that had gone on before, what else I would have to give up. After four years, though, I guess he’d seen as much of the world as he wanted. As soon as the Navy let him go, he came back here, moved right back in. It wasn’t two years before he was married and starting on a family of his own, here in this same house. And he hasn’t been much place else since then. ...