James Sallis - Cripple Creek

"Good."

After a moment he said, "I loved her, John."

After a moment I said, "I know you did."

"What the hell are we gonna do now, man?"

"You're going to go on, to Texas and all those places you two had talked about, and you're going to play and sing the songs you and Val always did together."

I went in and got the banjo.

"She told me you were learning to play."

"I don't think you can call what the banjo and I do together play. It's more of an adversary relationship."

When I handed it to him, he said, "I can't take this."

"Sure you can. It needs to be played, it needs to be allowed to do what it was made for."

We argued about it some more, and finally he agreed. "Okay, I'll take it, I'll even learn to play the thing. But it's not mine."

"That's what Val always said: that instruments don't belong to people, we just borrow them for a while."

"What about you? What are you going to do?"

I'm going to sit here on this porch, I told him. And once he was gone that's what I did, sat there on the porch looking out into the trees and back at the label on the wine bottle and thinking about the ragged edges of my life. About daybreak I saw Miss Emily walking at wood's edge with young ones in a line behind her. "Val," I said aloud, and as her name came back to me in echo from the trees it sounded very much like a prayer.

Somewhere deep inside myself I'm still sitting there, waiting.