you’ll curse the day . . .
—Hank Williams
Years after the fact, he would say it was the right time to make a move when he
was invited to come into the bank, but he could see his ascent
blocked by the bank president’s son, a man his very age and already groomed to
rise. So he clung to the safe job. Too late to take anything back
the day the news came that the banker’s son had died of a heart attack at the
mahogany desk in his father’s office. If our fates are fitted neatly
into the pans of a scale, it might have been anything that tipped the balance, any
wrong turn or luckless cut of the cards, something as unlikely, even,
as losing the autograph—Elvis Presley coming down the driveway of Graceland in
1958, braking a showroom clean Duo-Glide Harley
next to the cranked down window of his just as shiny Chevy Bel-Air, twenty-four
payment slips left in the loan book. The singer called him sir,
wrote out an autograph and handed the scrap of paper to his wife, six-months
pregnant with their first child, the sweet ending of a spring day spent
shopping and sightseeing before the hour-long drive back to their teaching jobs in
a crossroads town hardly big enough to have use for a school.
Or when he was a boy, keeping still under a sweat-soured quilt, trying to hide
from the polio virus settled in one leg’s large muscles, the afternoon
of his highest fever, and through the unscreened window he could hear his parents
reaching a decision on where to bury him. Might as well say
it all turned on the morning he was born, piercing the room with his first cried out
description of what had befallen him, and every time
the wind nudged at the curtains, the room’s shadows gave shape to a ragged patch
of sunlight shifting its restless edges on the floorboards.