The Song That Tarabeth Loved

Let that iron gate declare what it will: NO TRESPASSING AFTER 5 PM. It can't even stop the lawbreaking of winds: the reeling ones mock it. Look at it swat. So, whether you follow or whether you travel the long way around it will, either way, squeal its alarm into night and profess to its own instabilities. The young man here, the whistler, does he heed the admonitions of a few crusty, rusty old stiffjointed bars that must lean on each other for common support? Then neither should we. Sunlight still abides. And we are but ghosts to the paperpale ghost that has also been conjured the whistler's way.

What is that tune? I know it. And you?...It's Mozart? Of course! Piano Concerto One or the Other. An early one: filled with the promise of youth; an early one, nimble with fatherly goadings. Once on a time, that song was a hit.

It's here we begin. There's a story afoot: it comes over a hill barefoot to boot. Come, but be careful. Watch out for the brambles. Be mindful of pocks in the bugpeppered earth: some are deeper—deeper deliriously—than just shoals of sidelongpuddling shade. See now: see the girl, how she hurries, erratic in hoppings and twists? How she angles toward him desperately! You'd swear that his song were a savior's song.

If only the young man—fleeced of his surrounding sights, redhooded beneath his obliviousness—were to come to the realization that his hopeful and happy teethtootings at heaven has gained him a phantom fandom of one, I'm sure he'd desist immediately. The spell would be broken. At first anklesank into spongey graves; at first getting snagged onto stone crucifixions; though wakened, imploring with prayercupping palms! She'd stalk him no more. She'd return to her workanight doings in dirt. Nor would she harrow him later in life.

Harrow and stalk: maybe these words evoke images of graveside aggressions that aren't entirely merited. He pays her less mind than he'd spend on a derelict torpidly cawing through stubble for coinage. He barely senses her circling of him. Nor can you say she molests him as now when, fully arisen, she playfully tugs at the sleeve of his coat; she evanescently blows mistkisses under his collar; or slips a cold, autumncrisp hand into his. No, Tarabeth hasn't molested him yet.

Come, let us follow. We've nothing to fear. If about us the dead, with hanging mouths, are collected like saints for some higher surprise, they'll apply their every devotion to dust. They but lounge: they'll not move along with our tale. We are less a concern than collapsings of wood (we all like a dry roof). We are less an intrigue than an overdressed, starchy, and stuffy new neighbor. Ganging beetles are more a distraction than we. No, tonight, there will only be Tarabeth.

Don't think her a horror: she's fetching as whisperthin specters go, no? Her shadowfused hair, windstirred with leashed ravens, has grown even longer than living years grant. Its twists all but trip her; they grapple with calves; they'd keep her as trees are arrested—in rings. It lends pallor a shock of some bruiseblack decorum where clothes have long quit her for moldering.

Nor think that she's free with her airy affections. Tarabeth, she was never that way. She'd never the time or occasion to tease. It was rape, that time, long ago, it was rape. Papa must have believed her. He knew it was rape. Not once had Tarabeth stalked a young man (there's that word again, stalk). Never before—you can be sure—had she kissed one, caressed one, or danced for one. She'd not before euphorically soared to the lure of any beguiling songs. She's been far too intent on her agonies. Never before have leaves, long clenched at the prospects of winter, trailed in her wake, clacking after her. And if, while she starts to accost the young man, those clouds seem kitestrung above her spirit, counterclockwisewhorling with her, well, they'd kept to their own jurisdictions before. Self-involved as gleefully whistling boys, they'd not before taken to Tarabeth. This thing, it is new: like her rapture, it's new.

And everything will end sweetly? Of course. Don't trouble yourself with such trifles as that. You've a warm place to go and I'll point you there. Please. And Tarabeth? She's ecstatic now. See her? Just look at her twirl with her leaflings in tow! After so long a torment, look at her go! Now what could appear any sweeter than that?

Squirrels sit no headstones in rising winds. Nor do groundhogs peruse the odd passerby. What fox shows concern for the bipedal race who've proven their contract with hounds in the past? In hours like this, curiosities reign. And deer, ducking low, seek out urban asylum in strangely aligned outcroppings of rock. Near the city they fear not a bullet, these deer. And barely a white tail fretfully wags. Illiterate deer, not a one can decipher the names over souls that they've loitered upon; they but chew the present into the past and, doe-eyed, examine the two creatures passing: one who gets battered about by the winds, the other who joyfully whittles the winds into mesmerizing knifings of noise. An antler taps granite like knuckling on low—and you sense it, how curiosities reign.

Fuming funnels above. Leaves spinning about him all but ritualistically. And he notices not: there's a song in his billowing hood, in his head. The maestro has told him of fame today. Further mastery of the piano keys awaits him at home, at the fireside. It's his greatest joy, that instrument. Success will be spoonfed. Life will be grand. And—speaking of spoons (and their cousins in forkdom and cutleryland)—mom will have supper no more than an hour's contrapuntal counterchoppings away from where it belongs—in his belly—and home will smell perfectly, blissfully, lovingly, absolutely ovenly.

Of a sudden, the prodigy stops in his tracks. He blows his nose. Like a siren, the noise rudely interrupts song. Tarabeth's spirit, too, is suspended: leftleaning and skewed by the rakings of wind. Where hope, so happily sounding, had roused her—now, with this hole in the sound of all hope—she recalls the long restlessness of decay. She remembers repulsion. Her mouth, a black halo cut back from her head, thrusts odious silences into the sky. Where is that tune that had ended her pains? Where is that absolution? That grace? She had heard it, she thought, but a noseblow ago.

Yeah, the tissue ghostflutters in front of his face. Its puppetry—tremulous, flimsy, and pale—makes Tarabeth feel like a laughingstock. In fact, that's the word that Tarabeth uses: So, am I to be a laughingstock now?...a laughingstock...still? She recalls that he's there, this person standing behind the goowiped fingerpuppet, and—leaning in while the breezes bait her, lulling (it would seem) for her—she blinks at this face, at this hoodhaloed face, at those cheeks ruddyred with full-living and health. She's aghast. She's aghast to find youth in adjacence. Mementoes, wistful mementoes, she sees in the sparsely if perkily pimply chin. Slowly downsettling, though batedly bouyant, her toenails scrawl divinations in mud. These are omens that scarlings (the familiars of starlings) and robin deadbreasts, byflitting, can read. Of course, the young man detects not a sign: he's busy knucklerubbing his nose.

An apocalyptic snotbubble bursts.

Tarabeth flinches. Her cheeks of rice paper implode to rosepetals. You roused me for this? she rasps at his face. What are you? And why are you haunting me, boy? Assisted by breezes, she flicks at his hood. He resettles it. Oh? And she flicks it again. I want to discern what is hidden beneath...are you animal? vegetable? criminal, pray? She thinks she'll pinch his heart, perhaps, or blow aneurysms like treats in his ear but then—he's so lucky!—the thread of Mozart's hovering melody, clipped so curtly, tickles his brain. He whistles anew. And snatching her own theoreticalthreads, like milkspillings strained from contentment in mud, Tarabeth smiles. Pathetically hoisting what lingers of linen away from the sod—as to keep it clean for posterity (now irretrievably) past—she smiles as only her skull may have done for a century's tossings and turnings of Earth. Her eyes—smoky pits where eclipses have gone on to stanch themselves—are lanced by rays of lateral gold. She can see the old sun. She remembers the sun.

Ah, there she goes! She's dancing again! For this was the song that Tarabeth loved, this Mozart piece. It was, also, the tune that her papa adored and the one that she tried to perform for him. And it isn't as though the young musical man has made whistling into a form of art. Whistling, of course, is a common thing, a thing undertaken by all but the greatest and most accomplished of citizens. It's the unblemished joy in the sound that has roused her—the joy and, as mentioned, the melody.

So, she's warned the prodigy once again. She's warned him ten times with her touch, with her breath, with her whisperings. As snows—still poised to the most eager flake—can be tasted in air as if timelessly, so her neck presents itself to him. With it wafts an array of terrible weathers. He smells what he thinks is a squall of pollution. It gives him no pause. The claphound chases the clap of his shoes. He's oblivious to her. Silly young man. When she says, as now, I’ll take all your bliss. I’ll strip you of bliss. It’s your fault for this almighty taunting of me! he'd do well to open his mind for a change and to trip the trapdoor for the the craniumspanning conga line of cutlets, baked potatoes, pies, soft, buttery biscuits, and cabbages. I’ll eat your bliss like a cream! she says. So, she's warned him again. Marrow me! she appends. He'd do well to listen a little bit more. He'd do well to get clear these murky grounds, to shake free of the resolute suck of this soil.

Tarabeth, meanwhile, spins in such rags that would smother a newborn's dawning breath. At the opposite end of the cycle, her tatters would prompt poppings up of the elderly: who'd amaze the silence with too-sudden croaks; who'd make snowy clutchings of cold cotton drifts mid the four-posted moonfluorescence of (what they find amidshivers to be only) bed. You can see she's ungainly. The knock of her knees is lost in the constant clacking of leaves. Her elbows are turkeys fiercely flapping, naygobbling the rumors of gravity. She giggles and Ooooooh!s. She giggles and Aaaaah!s each time that she stumbles over a marker or scrapes against a crucifix. So she isn't agile, the highstepping wraith! So her counterinterpretive dance might only be fully esteemed by the spastic mad! We should look past that. Clumsy me! she admits. Even when (sincedunked generations ago) she still managed to cling to the common flotsam of randomly passing remembrances, when she still was able to bob up out of oblivion's serendipitous depths, not a person would have recalled her in dance. No such silvery picture had ever been burned daguerreotypically onto a brain. Only the image of Tarabeth, heartrendingly rigid before her piano; studious Tarabeth, hammering keys and—to the perceptive—a girl whose eyes grew ever more haunted the more that her fingers would fail in transcription.

Not after the night that her father had struck her—the night she was tardy arriving at home from her purchase of trinkets in Germantown—could she muster the spirit again to attempt so demandingly joyous a melody. That, of course, was the night she was pulled from the path. She was barely a body's-length into the trees (she could still toe the road), but till morning, perhaps, away from the nearest noisemaking savior to travel the pike. That was the night that Jonathan Tingle, insistently gripping, said 'Pray, I'd not do you harm, Tarabeth, but suffer me briefly, I've something to show you.' That was the night he said sweetly to Tarabeth 'Pray, don't weep: I'll be ever so sweet with you, lassie. Lie back.' She could feel the sheaf of cold steel at her breast. 'Fix yourself on the stars,' he instructed her, 'pray.' And then he was sweet. More sweet than those chilled and uninvolved stars that, even despite their recommendation, would prove but a pox on the Almighty's face. More sweet than the trees: she'd not before noticed how livid they are, how they swing at existence and roil to their roots. Sweet, the young Tingle, to leave her a quilt—a manyhued quilt: a thick cloaking of leaves. He was even more sweet than the hog that had nudged her, nudged her repeatedly into the night and, snorting the while, would have tested that roadside attraction with nibblings if—briefly—her limbs, moonillumed, would stop twitching. It would have become more emboldened, as well, if she'd only refrained from that manner of noise. The hog—a wild hog that knew nothing of mental displacement or Mozart, a beast that was wary of sounds we'd call humming—afforded her reason to finally rise. The leaves, they had been so attentive to her! but that hated creature just kept horning in. So, clutching a glorious rock in her hand, she would chase that skullscraped pig like a primitive, fearing at first neither woods nor their night.

She'd need Papa more than when Mother had died. She would tell him the truth. But what could she know about politics? or the prime importance of social position? She couldn't so much as comprehend the mysterious mapping of blood on her dress. It wasn't her monthly. She hadn't been stabbed. Am I dying? At first, she believed she was dying. At seventeen, sheltered year upon year, she had scarcely grown up to be more than a child. Poor girl, she hadn't been schooled about life—its loving things, its natural things—let alone its unnatural cruelties. How might she have known that her father, abashed at the virginal blood, would consider the gabblings of family disgrace from Philadelphia's whitewigged gentry—themselves, ironically, far more anemic than girls who had lost their maidenhead? He'd scare Tarabeth, invoking first 'Sarah! Sarah, how could you leave me to this!' Then he'd floor Tarabeth with a single slap, a shock of repudiation that would ravage her worse than all seven sad thrusts and three slobbered 'I'm sorry!'s of Jonathan Tingle. A face—once a father's, but now made of brass, of shadows and brass—turned away that night, along with its light. The head muttered 'Scandalous,' candle-eclipsing. It followed the saucerborne flame up the stairs. 'Not a soul need know about this. We are shamed.'

Came a time when some further grace in the crossbeams took her attention away from the keys. Mock paradise hovered just over her head. So who can have guessed that the laughter we're presently hearing is hers? A sound so true and sublime in release it could make the despondent see sunlight on razors? Who might have guessed it? Seldom Tarabeth laughed in that closing year of her life. Even the young man, detecting it, faint, from the furthest reach of his cluelessness, decides—not to fear, I’ll take care of you soon -- that his stomach is requisitioning food.

Good—and not soon enough for me. It's my least favorite part of Barren Hill. We're nearly beyond all these tedious stones, the stones qued up in engineered rows as for some presumed entitlement. Perhaps there is a sale in soil? A giveaway in frostappalled grass? Well, it must be a deal: there are line-jumpers, too. You can see the upheavals they cause every day. Here's one, just getting the lay of the land. These are generations of supersization condemned to minimalism in death. At times, they are a comical lot. Laid low! And with such abdominals. Laid low! And no gray in Methuselah's head. Laid low! And with so much vacation accrued. Here's a pitiful one who keeled over believing that Valentine's Day—much like Cupid himself—was a floating date year after loveslighted year. These stones are, of course, the more recent stones: the stones of clean lines that are all-too-fittingly robotengraved; the bulky stones, the artless stones; the stones that evince something tragic and bleak—beseechingly bleak—and glazed over, and undistinguished and unimaginative in modernity. And the clock in the distance, tolling, tolling, phlegmatic with rust, reiterates the brassy fact of its (and our) mortality: it ratifies time, more time, even now, with each timely, vibrant, batscattering gong. Whether mourning's in evening or evening's in mourning, the clock—and we all—are compelled to move on.

The young man, again, leaves the melody hanging—this time at its loftiest, triumphal note. He moves off of the path and into a huddle of weathered and starkly diminutive stones.

Pathside, Tarabeth tries to pause. Nuts, squirrelsquandered, roll underneath of her downdangling feet. She skates overtop of them, into a tree, and swingingly clings to it—lynched as laundry. She sniffs. She snuffles. Oh, it offends! It's a ginko tree: the prime model of aberrance, poorness in planning or, simply, dark humor in landscape design when this place's solemnity is considered. Why plant such a tree on an acre like this? If not only to trouble the brain throughout autumn with concepts, potently nostrilinduced, of death and its next of kin: decay. The ginkostink envelops her as if she—and she alone—were the source. She crinkles the indistinct cone of her nose. She cannot wait here (some branches are even so low as to rib her while others accusingly point her way). She cannot wait here—yet sidling, sidling, scrabbling on nuts—she cannot force herself to go there. She watches the young man moving away. Oh, where is he going, my little puff pastry? She skirts the brambleoccluded field.

Here's where hearts sink deeper than spades can dig. It's where willow trees droop with their spellspent wands in some bleak mimicry of the doctorshrugs. Here's the place beyond places where nevergreens loom. It's the branchlatticed corner of little lost lambs. In nightlight-phosphorescent fleece made up of seasonal reachings of moss, they are carved in recumbance above their wards. Scattered among them are windeffaced doves that are earthbound to tablets, their feet granitegripped; their wings—to the striver—are broken and chipped.

Some of the toddling tragedies here weren't given the time to have mouthed their own names, so it's decent that Fate with its dealing hand has expunged the letters from most of these stones. It's proper that winter's horizonheld snows will, crouplike, clot any syllables still decipherable. It's virtuous that petals should flush, fanning out over numerals as shamed for a god that would press such claims—such outrageous claims. If not for those things, then Fate, itself, would not simply be cruel, but would seem to delight in its cruelty; the seasons would prove but passing shams; and god would be irredeemable through the character witness of workmanship. If not for those things. If not for those things.

Ah. But let us move on from all that. Such gasoline rancor belongs with the stricken (the sulphorous stricken). Such is their right......whatsoever whomsoever presumeth to sayeth them wrong. Me? Well, I'm just the custodian here. Already, I've labored here year after sluggishly pallborne year: I've seen many calamities finalized (or so such tidy wrap-ups are assumed in parlors, in bars, and on pillows impressed with how wildly unkempt a headful of bereavement is apt to become). It's my mission statement to find indifference: sacred indifference. Indifference with wormwaggling shovel in hand. I think, maybe, hosannas will rain on me then. And I'll get that promotion.

But back to the boy.

Even happy, hungry, selfcentered young men will silence themselves when surrounded by so many little ones (stones). Nothing is more understandable. Even those who wander a wasteland of days—the materialmad and the opiumdopes, the rushers here and there, the greedy, the selfish, the petty, the tumored with hate—will dip their heads and say (if seemingly silently) 'hi.' They will. Oh, they'll place their disgraces on hold; they'll save them for streets. I'd done so myself. What gnarled stump of a human being would not do as much and be free to tred on without apt usurpations by botany? So does the hollowed out tree pay penance by harboring creatures—some tiny, some nuzzling, the peculiar one hurriedly wrapped in rags—through the flailing months of the wintertide! And—but for all their damnable flailing—what passerby might suppose that these trees are but husks of failed humanity? Our Tarabeth might. So, too, she now recognizes the field and the reason behind her prohibitance there. With a thorntorn, peripheral view of the place, she remembers it well and so suddenly.

Now what is that sound that is scarved behind winds? Listen. It rises. The shriek she releases! Even windswaddled, it slushes the blood. She wildly maneuvers. She yanks at the prickling stalks of her hair.

Don't hold your heart so frightfully cheap that you'd make so dear a gift of it. No. Stand back and behold her! Don't be naive. My own heart would go out to Tarabeth, too, if I had no concern for its being returned. There's no need to pull her out of the pulp or to make her aware of our following her. Have you bliss that you might appease her with? Or some ignis fatuus notion of peace? I certainly don't. Remember, I'm just the custodian here. And you're simply taking your shortcut home. The chubby young man, he will amply provide. Please......let him provide.

And speaking of him. He hops through and beyond all those trifling and whimsically godrepealed. He steps out to a path and he whistles away all that briefly intrusive solemnity.

So.

Tarabeth cups one hand to her ear. Is it joy? There is joy. Such a thing yet exists! Fibers of lintsqualling fabric she tamps on a milkwhite and nippled immodesty and—goosepimpled, like feathers upruffled on frost—she thrums once more with the pulse of delight. She hastens toward him. She calls to him, "Boy!" She'll not again give him a chance to escape.

He's heard her that time. He feels the intimation of fingers. He stops, midwarble, and moans as if stabbed. Babies are born amid such moans; the ancient pass on, samesoundingly.

See, I told you it would end sweetly for her. The wind no longer keens: it is stilled. Gates have no breezes to try to arrest. And over the shoulders of ten thousand tablets—in farms and meadows and tagalong towns, through streets and windtunnels collectively called Philadelphia—those who are in the least receptive, those who are stridently heathen unto the hymn of technological things—are suddenly finding joy in their musings. Many are smiling (others, perhaps, are asking them why?) Why? because Tarabeth's whistling, of course—if few have a clue concerning the source. So atonement is valid. Eternal rest must be more than a myth. (And whys? are content with I'm happy, that's alls.) She whistles so brightly that far afoam and further afield, six hours in the precession of us, it snows in Vienna. A pristine snow. A snow that sedates the obscene and manythroated threats that are spewed at it by industry. And Mozart, farting powdery ghosts of lime at regrettable massgravemates, chortles anew at conspiratorial musical notes that are crafted of nothing but childhood elation.

Tarabeth, going up over the rise, strews notes, leaflike, from transcendent release. Her silhouette, fading, subsides with the sound; it skips over the final roperays of the sun. Now she's pretty again. Now she's pretty and gone. Already, at last, she is resting in peace.

Not again will we hear about Tarabeth. Nevermore will I so much as mention her name. I'd not rankle pure nullity, sweetly snoring.

And the young man? Ah. Yes, indeed, the young man. Presently stooping over, he's silent. His spirit is broken. He feels at a loss. As for him, he gets to discover a world where piano wires snap (for accommodation of crossbeam dreams) and where children get to retire to cold bedrooms; a world where restless fingertwigs dash moonlight to manic concerti of madness and play the wainscotting along garish walls. It's a world, so cacophonous night after night, that shadowmannequinned closets (noted for frightening children), themselves are not permitted to sleep. It's a world where, perhaps, you go hungry to bed if your lessons are unsatisfactory.

I can't say for sure about Jonathan Tingle. I'd like to provide you some closure, of course, but he moves from one cowardly heart to the next. Under scalding moons he crouches in alleys. He skulks beside roads. He'll never relent. His kind must die uncountable deaths and few of those feats (if wonderfully violent goodies of justice) are here accounted for, in this ground.

And as for you, caught out in the cold. If you think to return here to Barren Hill with a day's gold array standing over your shoulder, carrying with you wildenoughflowers and truly wild prospects of spying the name of Tarabe-oops!—with its muddied descenders, crippled ascenders, and serifim trapped—in some hammerknocked stone, I assure you your efforts will prove to be vain. Give your flowers to one who can sneeze or be stung; thorns need to be validated on flesh. Moreover, that girl had no marker but sticks and those two crossed branches, though tardy in placement, have long and long ago collapsed. The lone figure who pushed that symbol in place—forbidden as it was in that righteous day and age amongst the potters, the thieves and the whores, the depraved, among killers, the ne'er-do-wells, the earthly damned and divinely dead, the hanged, the denounced, the miscarried, the mad, and amongst the sad, the sad, the sad and the wrenching adagio suicides, well, he's barely, himself, but a greatcoated shadow, the outermost burble in pebblecrimped waters, a vague reassertion of memory. In the way of the moon he waxes and wanes, but the swivelmoon's fleeting commute of a month is one sigh in a lost soul's century.

Oh, I see the music teacher at times, that greatcoated ass. He is schooled, himself, in remedial grief and is late, much too late, in his fatherly learnings. Sleep! Go to sleep! I whisper his way. Perhaps a small girl exists in that place who, stickilyfingered, will cake up your keys, who will nosepoke the simplest of songs for you. A precocious young child who'll giggle while slyly glancing your way. As yet unruined. Sleep! Go to sleep! I say. She'll be there. Adoration is there. But what do I know? That's no more than a guess. Still, it's someone's job to inform the wraith that he's more than two centuries into contrition. There aren't any clocks where he moves.

But we all have a lot to learn, I suppose. We all pay our dues. We're far too slow in our wits for the fleeting race of days afforded us. I mean no offense, of course, to you.

And so we go. There's your way, straight ahead. You can get to the other side through those gates. Vandals and vines have worked to secure your liberty. Go. My condolences for your mudspattered shoes. That was not my intent. It's sometimes sloppy, collateral damage.

Me? I'll be here. Putting in time. Seeking sacred dispassion. Auditioning for the hosts on high by ignoring every atrocity. But for now, I've a furnace awaiting my feet and my sopping recyclable socks for tomorrow. And if your repast can top some hot tea and a bowlful of bobbing suspicions in broth, you should go to it then. Count it a blessing. And hope—let's hope—we don't meet again soon.

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