There wasn’t any music, just the voices, together, together from a tent somewhere, somewhere off from where we were. Dusk was coming on. The woods, the woods that crept up along the boundary of the park, where the playground was, it wasn’t there, but then it was so vast and tangled and dark and cool, and the wind caught there, in the trees, and the dead leaves shivered and fell like a strange snow, with all the dust in the air from the combines and the trucks and the elevator. It was harvest, and the carnival was going, the air cool, the weather dry. I didn’t catch all of it. “The seed by him provided is sown o’er hill and plain,” the voices sang, “and with the gentle showers doth bless the springing grain.” We chased each other, Melinda and me. Her last name I never knew. Must’ve been a C. She stood behind Jakob Bjornsen in the lunch line, in front of Billy Crowe, so it must have been a C, but it could have been a B too. It doesn’t matter. Names have never meant anything. Dusk was coming on, and the woods was dark already, behind the swing-set, by the big oak, where the tire swing was. She said get in, so I did, I always did what she said, what did I care? She swung the big black tire back and forth, as high as she could. She told me to close my eyes, and, of course, I did it. And I swayed, above the earth, not yet in the sky, still under the tree, and I heard the voices, or maybe they had finished, and I just brought them back, I don’t know. “With good he crownest, the earth his mercy fills.” And the dead leaves were crashing into me as they fell, but I wasn’t falling. “The wilderness is fruitful, and joyful are the hills.” Higher, I said, higher, but I could have been flying, it’s just what you said. Maybe I fell asleep, I don’t know. “With corn the vales are covered, the flocks in pastures graze.” The wind was deep in the trees, in the woods, behind, and all was calm and dark, beneath the skin of my eyelids, and the leaves crashing, and the voices. “All nature joins in singing.” Another voice came in, against the song, maybe it had been there all along. The song went on, the voices still going, the other voice harsh, its words were numbers, meaningless to me, lilting over syllables, amplified somehow, from the other side, sheer rhythm, rhythm and numbers. “A joyful song of praise.” “Sold!” And for a moment there was quiet, almost quiet, only the wind, the leaves. I opened my eyes, and it was dark already, and she was gone. The black tractor tire turned a little. I’d sunk back inside. I’d started in the middle, but I’d sunk within the circumference, within it. I was looking at the empty middle, and there was nothing there, and I was gone, receded. I hadn’t been big enough for it anyway. Then the lights were on, on the other side, and I was going towards them. I was alone. I gave a man a quarter and went in. The corn was so high and dead and dry. It sounded like ancient paper, like a scroll winding or unwinding, when the wind came up. Night was full on, but they had the floods, and there was music somewhere, away, somewhere else, the cakewalk maybe. The way kept dead-ending, and there were other boys, I heard them laughing anyway. One path led to another and over and over again, and I kept moving through the corn maze, and the voices fell away. The music, maybe from the cootch dance, going farther off, away, a plug-in organ, vamping. The lights went off. I didn’t care, my pace was steady, I didn’t care, it’s what I was waiting for, for the darkness, to be forgotten. Up above, on the far side of where the carnival was, in the park, the trees were like dark giants dancing, titans dream-drunk, smoldering, in the cave of night, the Hecatoncheires, in tremors, shivering in the pit.
Abandon the path, go into the corn.
And I did.
It was dark, only the light from the night shows, the sound of the organ. The boundary with the blacker woods a few paces ahead. Something rustled the undergrowth there, and the wind was there. Was it man or beast? Was it Melinda? Was it my grave-gone father? Was it my stillborn brother? I thought that, I don’t know why. Maybe it was me, stillborn just the same, shivering in the pit, smoldering, in the cave of night, in the grave, man but beast. There wasn’t any music. Was there ever? The voices hummed or groaned, I can’t say which, but there were voices, or maybe it was the dead, or the banished, their moaning, in the wind, in the night, in the blacker night of the trees ahead, but it was music just the same. It was nothing, just through the corn, in the black beyond, the lights dead behind, the past dead behind, the dark of nothing ahead, the corn between us, no light, no point of light, and it was cool. I could feel it coming at me, the leaves were falling, with corn the vales are covered, and without stopping, to consider, my pace steady, the corn was gone.
I lurched in, to find nothing certain, to find nothing, myself within it, to be, to be done, to become, to come undone, not the righteous, back to dust, unfinished, unforsaken, unforgiven, sunken back within, in dark and calm and cool.
My eyes are open.