New Covenant Bound

Cumberland: Waking after Midnight

78 Cumberland: Waking after Midnight Father — the lights along the river no longer call you. They are only the smoke pots and lanterns of the black women fishing below Clark Ferry Bridge. What lies beyond that dark line of trees no longer summons, Gather, that none be lost — only the night breeze, thornstrung and disputing in a clutch of wild roses along the bank. Father — now the blue clouds assemble in their upper room a few stars scatter among the dust there where we will soon turn in time with the world. Now the birth-scarred moon slips free of its cold harbor and sails on. Coal barges southbound through the channel the Cumberland pulling her grief along like a rich purple robe there where we will soon lean together like old men our names emptied to be refilled there where we will soon step out wearing our morning garments. 79 " We’d been living in New Covenant about a year when a man from the newspaper come by the house. Said he was going around talking to some of the people that had been moved off the river, aiming to write a story about where they ended up and how they were faring. He asked me what I thought of having electricity now. I allowed that electricity was a wonderful thing, that it made a person’s life a good deal easier. Especially a woman’s. But I told him I thought I never would get used to an electric cook stove. And I was right. I have yet to get used to it, all these years later. Then he asked your grandfather something about flood control, about the river finally being brought in line. Your grandfather spoke right up. Said that if the only way they could make peace with that river was to let it cover as much land as it wanted, then it sounded like the flood was controlling them, instead of the other way around. He asked us if we didn’t think people were somewhat better off now, with all the so-called advantages the dam had brought. I told him there might be some people better off, if he meant the land speculators and whoever it was that sold the government all that concrete to build the thing. But as for myself, I couldn’t see how I was better off walking a half mile a day to sit at a sewing machine to help feed us than I would have been out in God’s own fresh air raising a garden and helping your grandfather make crops to help feed us. I told him he could have every bit of it back — electricity included — if I could just go back home, as hard a living as it was at times. 80 I doubt he wrote that up in his newspaper story, but that’s exactly how I felt about it. And I still do. After everything is gone, you just have to make do with what’s left. And that’s what we did. I never came to like the first thing about living in this town. I just got used to it. But after forty-odd years, I’ve never once called it home. ...