The Dead Man's Fiddle

Frank Stanford

A long time ago
A stranger rode into town
On a stout white mule.

The same day my brother
Who was mad from birth
Took a notion to swim the river
After a blue luna moth
Taking its own kind of journey.

He must have thought
It was a butterfly.
He spent time in front of trucks
Stroking their radiators.

He was always getting lost,
Climbing bee trees,
And putting up angels in the barn.

I still think he pretended to die,
Because we all pretended to weep.

Some boys shooting marbles
Tended the man's ride for him.
He gave them instructions to bite its ear.

He went into the hotel
And got a room.

His upper lip looked like a hawk
Gliding in the distance,
Coming towards you.

He went into Big Woman's Supper Tent
And came back out
With a slice of cornbread,
Wrapped in a silk paisley scarf,
And a quart bottle of sweetmilk.

When I think of my brother
I think of a white sheet with a hole
Left out on the line overnight,
The fiddle-player drinking milk.

He ate and drank
On the boardinghouse porch,
His pocketwatch opened up like a mussel in the mud.

Evening shined and was quiet
As the blade of a broken-down bulldozer.

But he must have heard something
Drifting over the sharecroppers' dark fields.

The moon was swollen up Like a mosquito's belly.

That night I found him
Face-down in the river,
I don't know if he was
Drinking or listening.

The white mule had the fiddle
Harnessed to him, like a plow.

Ginny Stanford