Caretaker

1

Most days he’d be out far beyond her sight

with bales and grain to feed his cows, or post-

hole diggers, rolled barbed wire, whatever he

would need on land they’d lent him in exchange

for work around their place. So they could stay.

2

She finally saw his face, or what of it

she could, beneath the country cowboy hat

when he came up to till her garden plot.

In March she’d brought the supper in to Frank

and asked the question that she knew would take

another thing away:

                                 Could Morton help

to till and tend her garden once Spring came?

It seemed an age before he said, “Of course—”

and then the old half-smile she’d missed for months—

“How else can summer mean your succotash?”

3

4

She still saw him around the barn as shadow,

Or pulling weeds, black-hatted. But when face

to face, each time she thought he looked unlike

the time before. He’d hardly talk or glance

at her, but Morton bent an ear to where

Frank lay.

5

                 In June she picked a rose each day,

a Mister Lincoln she and Frank had ordered.

The catalog had called it ‘heaven’s scent’

and so it filled his room, she thought. But now

there hardly was a space to put a vase.

Outside among the roses she had heard

the sounds from up the ridge. She knew, though she

had never heard such mournful calls as these.

“We’ve got coyotes,” she told Frank, “I heard them.”

He made to sniff the rose awhile, then whispered

“Remember Morton told us? Long ago?”

6

One day in August, just in from the garden

with corn to puree with some butter beans,

she heard a muffled cry from down the hall

and dropped the basket at the kitchen door.

Frank’s voice was rasping out a cry for help:

Help me, Morton!

                            She heard him as she ran.

And there was the caretaker, bending over,

as if Frank’s chest and mouth were engines,

as if his hands could start up what had stopped.

But Morton shook his head and passed her by.

7

Into the night, into long afternoons

she made a wail that coyotes answered.

But in the Winter, nothing answered silence.

In Spring the quiet rabbits splurged on weeds.

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