September Song Read Free

‘buzzards.’ She was here to gather material for what they call an ‘advance obituary.’ Somebody’s got to do it, but it is dirty work. What I didn’t tell her was my last words.”
    â€œOh, you’ve got them ready, have you?”
    â€œMmh.”
    â€œWhat are they?”
    â€œThey’re the last words of a writer: ‘In that case, I’ve got nothing more to say.’”

The Farmer’s Daughter

T HERE WAS NOBODY TRAVELING on the road nor working in the fields alongside to see the man fall off the telephone pole, for the day was the Fourth of July and the farmfolks had all gone into town for the celebrations. He had been replacing broken insulators on which boys liked to practice their marksmanship. He had just loosened his safety belt to descend. He fell without a cry, for he was already unconscious, having worked on to finish this job without going down to retrieve his fallen hat, something anybody should have known better than to do in the blaze of a Texas midsummer day, and had had a sunstroke. When he hit the ground he seemed to explode, the powdery dust bursting about him in a puff. He fell on his right leg, which broke with a crunch like a soda cracker. The climbing spur on his twisted foot, ripping through his trousers, tore the calf of his other leg. His head struck the base of the pole hard enough to make the crossarm quiver.
    In a last convulsive movement before falling the man had clutched the wire. It broke where he had spliced it, the loose ends snapping back toward the adjacent poles fifty yards away on both sides. The birds perched upon the wire bounced into the air on the wave of the shock, twittering at the disturbance. As the vibration ceased and the ends of the wire dangled motionless, they flew back and alighted again. The disconnected pole stood like a cross above the prostrate figure.
    The young man lay face up in the glare of the sun, yet he did not sweat. On the contrary, the sweat bathing his face when he fell, that icy eruption which comes, in sunstroke, as all the lights and darks are reversed and the world becomes a photographic negative, just before the loss of consciousness, had quickly dried, and his face, streaked with dirt, was now unnaturally cool-looking. His leg skewed in an inconceivable direction. His palms, black with creosote from the pole, were turned upwards as though in supplication. His breathing was so shallow his chest barely rose.
    It was after noon when the man fell. His lunch pail sat at the base of the pole. Beside it and his fallen hat lay the book, a thick volume entitled Torts , which he had read while eating. A few grasshoppers clicked in the air. A terrapin, having struggled across the road only to come up against the wheel of the telephone company truck, turned and dragged itself back again. The man’s face drained a shade paler and his jaw sagged, causing his mouth to gape.
    The shadow of the pole lengthened and slowly semicircled, a sundial needle, throughout the long afternoon. Occasionally the man’s throat commenced to work, trying to swallow. His eyelids opened, fluttered, then swooned shut again. His chest expanded, he gasped, and from his depths came a thick-tongued groan, a sound palateless and glottal such as deaf-mutes make.
    From time to time the two-way radio in the truck crackled to life and squawked, “Jeff Duncan. Come in. Where are you, Jeff Duncan?”
    After nightfall the holiday fireworks in the town erupted. Several times the injured man regained consciousness, only to lose it again shortly, which was merciful. For, as he would later tell his rescuers, it seemed to him that the explosions and the bursts of light were inside his head.
    Cliff and Beth Etheridge took a proprietary interest in the young man whom they had found so badly injured, whose life they may have saved, all the more so when they learned that he was alone in the world, orphaned in his infancy. Having lost her