5. You
You are in our cold upland waters when they come tumbling down from the mountains and cleanse away the soot. You are in the summer storms that crack the sullen sky, all of a sudden, and drop their rains down over Clingman’s Dome.
You are in those cute little hobby farms for tourists with their perfect little pastures, their custom built craftsman houses, ringed with perfect rainbows of invasive flowers all in bloom. You are in the real hardscrabble farms, out in those working piebald pastures, among those scrawny bulls and the scraggle-bearded folk trying to eke their bare existence from this Appalachian dust.
I see your frolicsome joy in Chastity, I see it’s jaded negative in her mother. I see your wan smile in Jim’s forgetful grin. I see your crackling temper when Donna is in a mood up at the shop and her how’re y’all sounds more like now what in the hell do you want, but maybe more so I see your temper in those sudden summer storms because you would always find a way to sublimate that anger--into working, into chopping up kindling into teeny, tiny pieces, into tinkering with that leaky radiator on the van--just like the storms sublimate their anger into healing rain.
I feel you in William. Though you two will never meet, it’s your patience that I feel in him. It’s your acceptance of God’s good grace as both a bounty to be savored and a burden to be borne, of love between two people as both a promise and a debt.
You are the mountain mist which clings to each and all. You are that gentle cold that settles sideways in my bones.
You are in all these things, but the one thing in which you are not is that taffeta-lined casket that I picked out in town, from the paunchy salesman with the runny, red nose. Him wiping his nose and expounding to me the virtues of copper versus bronze or fiberglass or steel and me nodding politely while knowing full well that some box lined with taffeta could never hold you. Knowing full well that you would live in all of these places but you would never fit inside that tidy family plot.
Forgive me for the choice that I have made, for choosing not to believe that you are just there, just moldering there where I laid you down beside your father.
You and God forgive me, please, for never--not even once--having returned.