DISAPPEARING TOWNby J. Scott Brownlee Empty the summer of its sweat. Empty the river of its silt where Troy once jumped down from the dam, making a strange stunt- show of it. I will bet you a dollar and a quarter I won't break my leg, he said, when I jump off of it. Empty the casket of the other boy who drowned and his mother's Bible where she wrote her son's name in the margins a thousand times. Empty the parable where Jesus walks on water in a storm and replace it with Jesus drowns. Everyone drowns. Empty the disappearing town that is invisible to me, the one I often thought was too much to return to with its George Bush and its Baptists and its single-mindedness. There is only one way, its preachers say. But then, what do they know? Empty the mineral deposits, Llanite rocks and coal-black clay. Empty the silver mine, its prospectors, the dust of wealth still clinging to their fingers. Empty it. Empty the highways of their trucks and midnight switchback Saturdays, their dizzy drunks and Sunday drivers who have come to see the flowers. Empty the fields so full of bluebonnets it hurts. Empty the churches of their many congregations, pews and prayers. Empty the cup full of grape juice, because it won't turn into wine. There are no miracles —not here. Empty the podium my friend stood on and preached from in the Pentecostal church, his grief flowing like water from his mouth, from his blue-tendrilled tongue at his friend’s funeral where he spoke of the vanishing faith that he felt as he watched the boy drown: I could not save him from the undertow, despite the fact that I tried. The floodgates were open. |