By September, 2011, my father had been dead for nearly six
years and I was working in commercial production and promotions at a local
television station. Still, I channeled him again for this piece that was a poem
for a few years before I eliminated the line breaks and did a slight rewrite.
Originally
published in The Dead Mule School of Southern
Literature, 2012.
Tuesday Evening in a Small Southern Town
By Lee
Wright
Today, we worked just as we always have: Me on the line,
spot-welding dull, gray steel, Teddy driving the old, green Clark forklift, and
Earl, senior man, at the press controls.
None of us saw the news until lunch.
We didn’t eat much; just watched in shock then went back to work when
the horn blew.
Now, we sit just as we always have: On Earl’s front porch,
screened from the mosquitoes, drinking Bud from cans and watching the Lab pup
romping where Earl’s kids once played.
Inside, his wife watches TV and cries.
My beer is warm, the can still half full. I’ve given up cigarettes again so the beer
tastes flat, even pointless.
Teddy crushes his empty and lights a smoke with hands
scarred by ten years on the Line. “What
you reckon will happen now?” he asks Earl.
Earl served eighteen months in Vietnam so we expect him to
know such things.
Earl sets his can on the dormant gas grill, his dark eyes
focused somewhere down the street. “I
reckon I’m goin’ to have one more beer then I’m goin’ inside. Our shift starts at seven in the morning.”
Teddy looks at the gray concrete blocks of the porch, his
thick head moving slowly side to side.
He wants to believe that now it will all be different somehow and he
can, at least peripherally, be part of something bigger.
I pour what’s left of my beer onto the brown grass as I walk
home down a quiet, small town street.
Later, I will lie, just as I have for years: In the arms of a woman who
says she loves me, in the quiet little town where I was born and will probably
die, a thousand miles away from the big city.
© 2012 Lee
Wright
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