Bookman's wake

idiom, with names and all.”

She read it.

Grayson had with him a harlot, who had come to

him from Charlotte,

Though Atlanta, Georgia, was her domicile of

yore…

“There’s another line I can’t read,” she said.

“It says, Who, you ask me, could this pig be, who so got the goat of Rigby . If you look at it under a glass, you can make it out.”

“He’s doing it again, mixing his own role with Rigby’s.”

“But he catches it before the stanza’s done and squiggles it out.”

Her telephone rang.

She took back-to-back calls, from Phoenix and Baltimore. She made her notes with a poker face, as if she were working a rewrite desk assembling facts for a weather report.

She looked up from the phone without a word, pushed her notes off to one side, and again took up Richard’s poem.

“You can see the words changing as it goes along. The tone gets darker, angrier.”

‘’He was a clingy kid,“ I said. ”He was what?…thirteen, fourteen years old. His brother was four years older, the difference between a boy and a young man. Richard counted on his brother to be there when things in his life went wrong.“

“Then it got to be too much.” She flipped a page. “We can only guess how Darryl felt, when all we’ve got is Richard’s side to go by.”

“My guess is the same as yours. He was being suffocated by his father on one side and by Richard on the other. So he ran away with his girlfriend to the coast, only his friend Moon knew where.”

“And Moon wasn’t telling.”

“And Richard settled into a cold rage. He had already lost his mother, and now the unthinkable was happening, he was losing his brother. To a kid that age, the feeling of abandonment was probably enormous.”

“He hated Moon for obvious reasons.”

“Moon was everything he could never be. Strong, independent…the kind of man Grayson would want for a brother.”

“In South Carolina, Grayson found that sense of purpose that would carry him through life. He’d fought Old Scratch and won.”

She read it.

And when the young god chose to fight, he waged

a battle that was mighty;

Purpose kept his honor far away from Satan’s

harsh and blust’ry roar.

This was how he rose above it: did his work and

learned to love it,

And his skills made others covet everything he

made and more.

‘Tis some deity, they marveled, living there

beyond that door:

He’d joined the gods, forevermore.

For three stanzas the god walked on water, could do no wrong. All he touched was blessed: he was on a spiral ever upward.

Then came The Raven .

And when it seemed that none could daunt him,

A sepulchre rose up to haunt him

Stuck in there as if to taunt him, all the more to

underscore

That he who’d walked among the gods