Inturned Things : We can't say plainly

Low and scant, a pensive drift bares us to them
in their awful sequences: Truths, that arrange us upon the alters
of circumspection, adieu, by each adieu.
They come yet to pass, and it is here, and with such stammering lips that, we've, our votive sacrifices made ...

In-turned Things: We can't say them plainly

I was big enough to walk, and not much else.
I can still commune the linger and bite of morning's frost on the thick beggar-weeds and big grass, that he trounced through, grass,
that was bigger than me!

"Wait for me Daddy, wait!"

He flipped the long-handled shovel and caught it
both in his other hand, and lain neatly, over his left shoulder.

then, reached back his enormous arm, like a club, and
clutched my wrist; whereon, both my feet left the ground, and I was swung,
seemingly, to another monolithic state relentless, like pounding with great human-hooves back and through a pasture, a 'long since' sugar-cane patch, by past fallen, posts and old rusted barbed-wire fences then into the woods, down to, and along a slough bottom creek.

Silvery-grey, metallic and sand swirled bank's guarded peculiarity: that's, Louisiana's own sweet-smelling mud where we stopped there, and he'd set me down.

On the other side of the creek, flushed, a gaggle of crows from their solace in the lower boughs of a magnolia grown up amongst the thickets and mostly hidden by the hardwoods.

Awkward disdain, bantered them upwards in all their stark objections, and rained them, their
curses down as they flew to scatter themselves, and calling every scorn from their incident haste
and disarray, these, of summonses also and upwards in the crawling waters.

Up, and no bigger than minnows: a group of velvety black catfish effervesce from somewhere beneath; in muted little appendices, each to the other: Conduct, much to my covetous interest; and while, in their midst they protect something seeming of solemnity. Lazed, they swam in a kind of circular rehearsal, as if they all knew and understood the function.

"Boy, stay outta that water!"

Startled, I turned in my curiosity, now fixed on my father's toward preoccupation, and again,
and determinedly, he was digging after something through the long sassafras roots. Wanting to see
what, I walked up closer to the hole. Now stooping down, he gently pried something out of the
shallow muddy vacuum, as the void was quickly refilled with sand and water. It was a man's skull. He held it up to inspect, then he turned it back and toward his own face, and brushed away some, more of the mud, as, he made a pronouncement: "See here?"

"This nigger stole whiskey! and they killed him for it!" Then, He laid his hand down situate, to place it flatly on my head.

"They killed him with a cross-cut saw, I seen em do it! I was up in front of a wagon, next to Papa,and when we pulled up to the Ol' man Bill Malay's place, he was walk'n cross the yard, back to the niggers' house, with a saw in his hand. He went up and jerked at poor Ol' nigger Amon, out nuh yard, pushed his head down, then reached around and cut his throat wi'that cross-cut saw. Amon went, n' tried to git back in his house, but the Ol' man just stood in the door
kick'n him backwards down the steps, till Amon, couldn't git up no more. Then, the Ol' man and Papa hauled him down, and buried him here, then they washed it off in this creek and then, they got drunk.

But I know'd, he was still right here, I know'd it, cause I seen it!
I seen it when I was little! This here nigger, made lots'uh good whiskey! He cooked it a
long time, for the Ol' man...But they said : 'He just up and stole it!'
Ya know, they made em niggers cook it, cause revenuers was come'n round here.
And Amon, just up, and stole it! Now, look here, we gotta put tis back!"

He placed the skull back in the hole and drug the muddy sand back in, over it.
I re-attended myself back, to the creek's small catfish procession, as they were now almost swam away, fading back into the silence at the dark bottom of the deep hole. After a few seconds, I couldn't see them, any of them ...

"Don't you ever tell anybody bout tis boy!" : "You hear me boy?" --The End--

Foot note: Rumored, some years later, that, Amon, found the Pentecostal "Holy Ghost," religion, on the night before; and while in a 'state' of euphoric indignation: Amon, poured the Ol' man's whiskey out!