The Troubles That Women Start Are Men

On the porch, unbreeched shotgun dangling

Across one arm, just after the killing,

The murderer, Billy Winkles, made polite

Small talk with my father while we waited

For the sheriff to come. The reek of cordite

Still loomed above the sheeted corpse, his uncle

Ben, whose various dark and viscous organs

Jeweled the lawn. “Want some coffee, Von?”

I heard, and thought, A man is dead. And then:

Why had my father brought me there to stand

Alone, out of place, half-terrified, bored

With the slow yammer of weather and crops?

I stepped carefully across the rotted planks

Toward an oak where an engine block

Depended from a blackened limb and watched

A dull dazzle of horseflies, a few puddles

Hounds had dug like chocolate ruffles

Hemming the chicken yard. “I told the son

Of a bitch, come back, I’ll shoot you dead,”

And he sure had, for sniffing round his wife.

He said, “It just ain’t right.” He rolled

A smoke and dragged a steady flame alive

While neighbors shyly stomped from pickups

And lifted the sheet to poke and peek.

“That’s Ben,” one said. “That’s Ben to a T.”

But was it? Was any of it real, the empty

House, the creek? My father saying, “Now

Your mother, she was a Partain, wasn’t she?”

“Naw, she was a Winkles, too. My wife was

A Partain, she’s over at Mai-Maw’s now.”

It went like that, and this. The wind drove

Up and set the shirts to popping on the line.

A red tricycle leaned above a one-eyed doll.

The mountain’s blue escarpment unwound

Green bolts of fields, the white shelters

Where we lived, all of it somehow wrong,

And magical not to have changed while

Trucks backed up along the ditch and men

With their grown boys clambered uphill

To gawk at Uncle Ben who lay like shortcakes

Lined up on sawhorses on decoration days.

How strange, I thought, that no one prayed,

And strange that I was there, actually there,

With grown men, not sad or happy, but proud,

Knowing even then, the years would mostly

Amount to sleep, my father would come back

As history, and still there would be

To say the strobe of the ambulance light;

The sheriff, a tall, portly man, stooping

To help the handcuffed killer into the car;

And on the grass, bits of liver or spleen—

Whatever I’d dream, the world is not a lie.

Copyright Credit: Rodney Jones, “The Troubles That Women Start Are Men” from Things That Happen Once. Copyright © 1997 by Rodney Jones. Reprinted with the permission of Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.

Source: Things That Happen Once (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 1996)