John the Posthumous Read Free Page B

Houndsditch.) Fragments of such contraptions—thought to cure various ailments—were sold at auction. Or stolen in town, as the case may be. The procession would pass through Lock Park and Blackton—the latter the site of a cattle market, a naval yard, an arsenal—and conclude in Charlton, for the sermon. The men wore horns. The carts, as I understand it, were dismantled at the end of the day—the wood stacked and then set afire.

SIX
     
    T he soldier—a redcoat, by all reports—chokes on a coin or a nail or, more likely, dead bees, three or four of them, shown here in a gray basin and on a white bedsheet. (Better a high bed, as the saying has it, than the sound of blood.) The sound of the blade—the implement is a short dagger rather than a mortuary sword—carries very well. Or so goes one description of the event, despite the burnt curtains, the slaughtered dog, the music in the attic. (A bruit, for its part, is a noise—a fault—in the heart.) The arms, in this formation—a martlet proper, at the battlement; shield, pommel, and hilt vert—are thought silent with regard to a falling body, for instance, or a sinking ship.
    T he crying wife, in folklore, is carried from a house—a burning house, in those unfortunate drawings—and then down a road and through a town—or across a field and through a forest—in a wooden bed. (The cannons seem charmless from this angle.) Thence south, perhaps, in a rainstorm, past the sorrow in the burrows, the jackchain and the shooting wall, and now, near a creek or a lake, the sounds of a drowning. A family stands in the grass—the boards red in the background, the steeples green. (Her heart went white, as the saying has it—or, more precisely, silent.) The nightdress is woolen, a plain design, open at the collar or fastened there with a clasp or a knot or just a common pin, the click of which may suggest an insect. (Hessian flies are Russian, in fact, and are sometimes confused with wasps.) Marks on a door, often a collection of scrapes or engravings, can indicate the loss of a daughter.
    T he orphan swallows a small bird, a finch or a sparrow, even a parakeet, wings clipped, eyes excised—at least as the narrative survives in the upland boroughs and in several of the Eastern towns. (Bloodbirds, so-called, are said to produce a rueful sound.) A bloody bone is thunder, in one version, and timber and chimney smoke, in another—or a pile of sticks near a river, just before the war. (The treetops seem to shriek.) A rag doll gives way to a stump doll—the face stained red, for the frightened child, or blue, for the dying child—which gives way, in turn, to a toy horse, described in a faltering voice. The rattlebox contains a hook and a blade, and is buried at the margin of the yard.

SEVEN
     
    T he brown-headed cowbird —as distinct from the white-throated finch , which attacks cattle—is entirely gray, in fact, in the female. These are apparent at your attic windows, three and three, at the end of the season. Several examples, wounded in the usual ways, can be found beside the house, in the flowerbed and in plants of the horsetail variety.
    Weeds, properly speaking.
    Pigeon’s neck refers to a pinewood gunstock. Pigeon’s wing refers to a shade of blue—but also to a knitting stitch and to a bloody wig.
    Crow is an old parlor game, in which the family hides from the youngest son. House sparrow requires a child, a length of thread, and two birds.
    Leave them there a moment.
    The fool hen is brown, in the female, and spotted white—with a black throat—in the male. These are drawn like ordinary barn-door fowl—the throat slit for the windpipe and crop, and then the vent for the heart, gizzard, and so on. It is correct to serve with cabbage and apples, or with pickled beets.
    Your father does the carving.
    Pigeon’s bone refers to a manacle or a shackle, especially at a hanging. Pigeon’s blood refers to a shade of red.
    House sparrow is played in the country, on