A Bloom of Bones. Allen Morris Jones

Coyote: Part I

      He slipped through burnt timber,

      thick fur damp under falling snow, browsing

      the day’s odors, tender nose tilted to the breeze.

      Then hesitated, ears swiveling toward

      something amiss.

      Me,

      a hunter clumsy in heavy boots; musing on

      the miracle of the moment. How I was alive here

      among the charred branches

      under the falling snow.

      He scratched an ear, licked at a paw,

      tasted the miles traveled since dawn. He had

      been here forever, and will be here forever, in the

      new snow falling gently

      on black bark.

      Amen.

      THE BEST ADVICE I EVER heard about poetry came from Buddy Singer, who wrote no poems. “Never apologize. Not to nobody, not for nothing.”

      Seeing her come off the plane, I thought: Love is admiration mixed with sex. She had wide shoulders and hips, a healthy frame. She carried herself like a college athlete adjusting to life behind a desk. There was a rhythm to her walking. Her sunglasses weren’t quite dark enough to hide her eyes, and when she first hugged me (doing the “mwah” thing, that New York kiss to the cheek), I smelled, in the corner of her neck, a faint odor of sidewalk flower vendors. My first feeling was one of simple gratitude. That she had come to see me, only me. I admired her bravery, just getting on a plane. Not knowing precisely what she was letting herself in for.

      Pete’s body was found by road hunters from Glendive. A father and son. They pulled off for lunch, sitting on their tailgate, eating sandwiches. The boy had his first pair of binoculars. He couldn’t be separated from them. From a distance, focusing, he could just make out a scrap of Pete’s T-shirt fluttering in the breeze. “What’s that on the edge of the trees down there, do you suppose?” Maybe it was a survey flag. “Go on down and check it out, if you want.” The father, fifty pounds overweight and just unwrapping a sandwich, was inclined to be indulgent. Let the kid have his fun. But then the boy was gesturing wildly. Come look, come look.

      A few minutes later, at the father’s feet, here was a portion of Pete’s temple, a clump of well-preserved gray hair. An eye socket, a glint of silver coin. “Good lord.”

      Pete had been proud of his hair; was always running a comb through it, patting it flat, drawing attention. He’d be pleased to know that it had withstood the years.

      The front page of the Billings Gazette? “Body Found on Poet’s Ranch.” The father was quoted, “We both just had this feeling, like something bad was about to happen, you know?” The story hit the wires.

      The clay, I suppose, the bentonite, had acted as a sealant, preserving the body. That goddamned clay. It scrolls around your tires, collects on your shoes. Everybody in Eastern Montana, we all live in this basin of antediluvian runoff from the mountains. Seventy million years ago we were under water. The mountains are rising even yet, slow as an hour hand. They’re mostly granite, which in turn is mostly feldspar, which erodes to clay. And clay erodes, it seems, to tumuli, the detritus of graveyards. Oil-colored imprints of delicate ferns and crumbling, tree-trunk femurs. The surface wants to shed the water but a good healthy cloudburst will peel it back in layers. A geological narrative, plodding doggedly backward. Given enough time, of course, it will reveal everything.

      His mother, dead not yet a year and still a presence in the house (bursts of bath soap from the closets, needlework arabesques in the dishtowels) had called him Hiram, but we knew him only by the name stenciled into his belt: Buddy.

      He had tried to clean up for our arrival, but the residue of filth he’d accumulated since his mother’s death was nearly insurmountable. Cookie crumbs in the throw rugs, fossilized jelly stains on the counter, a finger-wide trail of ants marching mudroom to pantry. Buddy himself smelled earthy, like turned soil and fresh milk in a bucket. He wore a flannel shirt and suspenders. Given his narrow hips and sagging belly (parabolas of white cotton T-shirt between the buttons), the suspenders were not an affectation. Nervous, he ran his hands over his graying crew cut. He turned to the kitchen with a flourish, saying to my mother, “You’ll be changing things, I guess. Making it your own.” Rotten dishes, festering garbage, apple cores.

      I was twelve years old. A nail-biter and mouth breather. I had allergies. Buddy took me and Emma into the back of the house, showing us the room where we would be sleeping. My sister affected arrogance, popping gum off my ear. We would be sleeping, it seemed, in a squalid shoebox of dust and dead flies, decorated with framed needlework. An iron bedstead and thin, stained mattress. Under our feet, a raveling runner the color of cheap wine. We were poor, it’s true. But I’d never had to share a bed with my sister.

      He had made most all of his own furniture, and because he was a poor carpenter, on first impression it seemed that he lived a haphazard, unplanned existence. Square photos displayed in skewed frames. Chairs wobbled in improbable directions. If a pea fell from your fork, it rolled northwest. The home of a transient, we thought at first; a derelict; a man of careless intent. But he was in fact entrenched; he was, in fact, meticulous.

      The tour took no more than ten minutes. It was an hour until dinner. What came next? At a loss for further distractions, he showed us his scars.

      His only piece of store-bought furniture was an overstuffed recliner. Upholstered in a coarse yellow fabric, glittering with metallic threads, the chair had apparently been fished from a stock pond, or barring that, bought from a yard sale interrupted by a torrential thunderstorm. It still held odors of damp and mold and mud. He sat in it now with the leg of his overalls rolled to one knee. His index finger traced the jagged teeth of a scar around his kneecap. “Barbed wire,” he said, dropping his pants leg. He unbuttoned his shirt, showing us his shoulder. “Birdshot.” Finally, he jerked off his boot and held up one bare foot, huge and hard as a hoof. “Axe.”

      Was it meant to be a boast, this exhibition? A swagger? Or perhaps a warning: See, this is what can happen. Or maybe it was an awkward attempt at graciousness. Two small strangers in his house, and in the process of revisiting his own childhood, he’d remembered his own curiosity about someone else’s wounds.

      I was appalled, fascinated. Emma feigned disinterest, playing with her hair. Buddy wheezed back in his chair, legs planted thick as stumps, big hands spread across his knees. He stared past us at a framed studio portrait of his mother. The old lady glared down, lips pinched tight as a purse. In the corner, his grandfather clock ticked hard. A black-and-white Australian shepherd, Tony, sat by Buddy’s chair, panting. Buddy’s hand dropped to the dog’s head. “Ssss, Tony. Ssss. It’s all right. You’re okay.” Emma pinched my leg, I stared at the floor. We both studied our mother.

      My real father tripped off the stage early. I know him only through the warped, one-dimensional lens of early childhood, flashes like the surprised catch before a movie breaks its film. His name, Seamus, stitched into the synthetic blue pocket of his work shirt; and the vague odors of gasoline, Speedstick deodorant, the sensation of spinning in his hands. Years after his death, his magazines still littered our garage. Field and Stream, Sports Afield, True. His appetite was for the pornography of bigger bucks, longer fish. A short man with dark hair and a skin tone all out of keeping with his Irish blood. I have his height and hair but not his skin. Even with his children, me and my older sister, he affected a nervous good humor that led one to believe that he’d once been the butt of jokes, that high school had not been kind to him.

      He died by drowning, a death precipitated by rumors of big walleyes on Fort Peck. “Catching them like this.” Four employees of High Road Mechanics made the necessary phone calls, changed into oil-stained sweaters, lumped themselves together into a 1958 maroon Buick sedan. Two transmission mechanics,