A BRIDGE OF BREATH
575
o
precious shard of the Old Mother Lode that we bury! Old Mother
Lode, ore of what dark cursed vein?
Songs went through my head, Folner, as I sat there, songs I
had known where, when? "0 had I the wings of Noah's dove, I'd
flyaway to the one I love...." "One day you goin' come and call
my name...." "My love went away on a long, long train...." And
the little verse, piping itself out in my brain, over and over ... "It
was just a little doll, dears, brought
in
from the fields and the rain;
its hair not the least bit curled, dears; and its arm trodden off by the
cows. And its face is all melted away. . . . " And the tale of the
gingerbread man who ran and ran and melted away as he ran....
And the mournful little tune that a child could blow on a Petunia;
and the words of the hymn "0 Love That Wilt Not Let Me Go" ..•
"When I was young," the voices howled round in Granny Gan–
chion your mother's head as she sat there gazing at you in your cheap
pink coffin, "I loved gems and jewels and would almost steal to have
a colored ring to glisten on my finger, just like a Gypsy. Weare bury–
ing here the glassy part of me. 0 me . . . desire faileth:
it
is the bur–
den of the grasshoppers. There is a fountain filled with blood, drawn
from Immanuel's veins; And sinner plunged beneath that flood lose
all
their guilty stains.... Sure we had nothing in Charity but Beulah
Land to hope for and wait for ... but how could they help! They
were not enough while we waited. The church cheated us, Brother
Ramsey cheated us. I had to burrow down
under
it
all
like a quick
mole to have any life. Don't think I don't know
all
this. Now there
Follie, lay still, lay still. Remember when I couldn't keep you quiet
on a pallet
in
the summer afternoons when you would have to take
your nap? This is the last pallet, little Follie, a pallet for good.
Lay still on it child. (There'S old Miz Van come to your fun–
eral-she brought you the first present you ever got in this world–
a pitcher of cold buttermilk the mornin you were born. Fly in the
buttermilk Lula Lula. . . . )
"What does he say, brother Ramsey, in his talking, in his ser–
mon? He is condemning FolIie to hellfire. The Lord hath hung this
millstone upon my neck, and I know what for and I have never told.
It is a lavalier of wickedness. It is the enormous rotten core of Adam's
Apple. But I have had my life in my time ... some way.... "
(You knew lips, how they move to make their words; and the
