Bookman's wake

She hung up and looked at me. She didn’t say anything and I didn’t need to ask. She looked down at the poem and said, “I think you’re right, if it matters. Richard had a well-honed sense of bitter satire. A frontal attack was never as much fun as a hit-and-run.”

“The title was blatant enough.”

“‘The Craven.’ What an insult that would’ve been to a man like Darryl Grayson.”

“It belittles his genius. It reduces Grayson’s life to the level of his own. And yet it has moments of real… what?”

“Love.”

“Read it again.”

She read aloud from the top: the world according to Richard, first revised version.

One night sitting with dear Gaston, as the night

fell deep and vast in

All its blackened glory: such a night to chill him

to the very core;

A colder wind I blew upon him, one I thought

would shake and stun him

And might even break and run him far away from

sorrow’s door.

But the child remained undaunted: all his faith

again he swore

Was in his god forevermore.

“I don’t believe this,” she said. “It doesn’t square with what I know about Richard or Rigby.”

“You can’t take it literally, you’ll end up doubting it all. I admit it strikes a false note at the top. We know Rigby wouldn’t sit still for what comes later, but that doesn’t mean other parts of it aren’t true.”

She read two flashback stanzas telling of the gods’ humble origins.

“I had it right,” she said. “If anything, I underwrote it.”

The father was a mean drunk and drunk much of the time. The mother was dead and unforgiven. If she wanted understanding, she’d have to find it in the next world because the son she’d left on earth had none to give her.

Lines in the middle of the third stanza made short work of these two and the sorry life they’d given their sons.

Brute and whore together spawned ‘em; then

forsook ‘em; tossed and pawned ‘em

To the devil who upon them did his vile and

wicked powers pour…

I joined her reading, quoting from memory.

One would join Old Scratch the devil, while he

watched the other revel

In himself, and gaze with level eyes upon the

predator…

“I don’t see that in here.”

“He squiggled it out. But it’s there, off to the side of the verse he kept. You can read it through the squiggle.”

“Yeah, I see it now.”

Up to this point Richard had worshiped his brother blindly, much as Rigby would do a generation later. “At that time, he was buying his own god scenario,” I said. “Grayson was his protector, the only real constant in his life.”

“Then it all changes. The god proves false.”

“He has his first serious romance, and Richard rankles with fear and jealousy.”

“Cecile Thomas,” Trish said. “I talked to her. She had gone to grammar school with the Graysons, then her parents moved away to North Carolina and came back to Atlanta when she was a teenager. A classic coming-of-age romance. Grayson thought of her as a brat when they were kids. Then suddenly there she was again, eighteen and lovely.”

“There’s a squiggled-out verse, just partly finished, when Richard was still trying to do it in a half-modern