Bluegrass Moonbow

    The grass was already tall and wild when I was young. I remember cycling down the Old River Road, past the plot with my sisters, who never stopped, who always would hall ass past the wrought-iron fence, with its sharp black spears painted black like the arms of a patient army waiting for its moment to climb out of the loose brown soil and begin their bloody campaign. Every time, though, I let my sisters pedal on while my wheels slowed, to the point where my bicycle started to wobble, and I had to put a foot down or fall over and scrape my knees in the loose gravel on the side of the road.
    It was a tantalizing mystery – it still is, although I think I’ve figured it out now. There was a house in the middle of the yard once, and judging by the size of the ruined river stone foundation and the charred pillars of cedar, it was a large house. A mansion.
    That fit the playground mythology we built around the plot; that it was owned by an evil old miser who kidnapped children and tortured them in his hellish subterranean dungeon; that no one ever saw the miser before the fire because he was allergic to the sun; that the mansion burned down one night when the tortured souls of his victims had soaked into every timber, every brick, and ignited with the white hot fury of the wrongfully damned; that the miser had died in that fire, but lingered on as a demonic shadow waiting to devour any children who were foolish enough to jump the fence and trespass in his private Hell.
    I never believed that, because of the grass. Someone always mowed the grass; not all of it, just a square patch under the sagging elm tree. My sisters told me I was being stupid whenever I would ask about this; no one was mowing the lawn there, it’s just one of those places where grass would not grow.     But why was it square? When I would ask that one, they just shrugged, and said maybe there was concrete poured there for the tire swing, referring to the rotting length of hemp rope that swung mournfully from a thick branch of the elm whenever the wind blew. I didn’t think that was the answer, but I kept the rest of my questions to myself, because I had learned the hard way that my sisters were just as happy to use their fists when I asked questions they didn’t have a real answer to, or didn’t want to bother with.
    As I grew taller, so did the grass in the miser’s yard, except for that one spot that you could just barely see over the tops of the blades that had gone to wheat. To be completely honest with you, I didn’t know what was in that square, but I spent many hours of my childhood imagining all kinds of exotic and outlandish occupants for that parcel of real estate, until one summer night when I decided to run away from home, and chose, on a whim, to follow the Old River Road out of town on my way to some distant place, New York or California, where I thought a teenager with no money and no friends could hope to make a life for herself.
    Old River Road, being little more than a dirt path through the woods, connecting nothing to nowhere, had no street lights, so it’s quite possible that I wouldn’t have seen the pickup truck that night if it hadn’t been idling next to the miser’s plot with its headlamps on. Under the pale reflected light of the moonbow I could only see a few feet ahead of my bicycle; far enough to pedal on at half-speed if I kept my eyes on the road, watchful for any large stones or exposed roots that would throw me painfully from my bike.
    The pickup’s headlamps knifed through the inky grey-black darkness like two suns, but blue-white instead of red. I kicked up a cloud of dust sliding to a hurried stop, and walked the rest of the way to the truck, with no hope of remaining unseen now, bathed as I was in brilliant artificial daylight. A clank preceded a slow rattle that grew louder and closer. When I stepped around the nose of the truck into the cool dark night, a loud bang and a thump made me jump, and my bike fell to the dirt with an angry clatter of its own.
    My eyes hadn’t adjusted to the darkness yet, so I never got a good look at the man, but his silhouette was tall, and square around the shoulders and cuffs, like he was wearing a suit. We had the briefest conversation, but I will never forget his voice; deep and mournful, with the slightest hint of distant lands and people.
    “You look like her,” he said, the car door opening with the pained sound of metal on metal. A light, dim and amber, lit up behind him, but only served to emphasize the shadow that he wore like a shroud.
    “Who?” I asked, possessed by the conviction that I was speaking to the miser’s ghost, and that his next few words would finally solve the riddle of the burnt ruins and incompletely tended lawn.
    “Der lebengeist,” he said, his voice saturated with regret and longing, or so it sounded to me, with my then brief acquaintance with either emotion. I was disappointed; his words meant nothing to me, did nothing to dispel the mystery that had long flirted with my imagination.
    The pickup’s engine puttered, then roared, and it rolled away shortly after I heard the door slam shut. I stood there until the red lights vanished behind a knot of trees, breathing in the exotic aroma of burnt hydrocarbons, all the day’s drama, previously so important, gone with the gentle breeze that blew through the grass in long, sighing gusts.
    A quiet clink brought me back to myself, and I followed it as it repeated in time with the ebb and flow of the wind. As I drew closer, I saw that the man in the pickup truck had left the massive gate, with its cast-iron lion’s head topper, closed, but not locked, so now it swung unsecured through the half inch or so the latch allowed, tapping out the wind’s slow rhythm.
    Consumed by curiosity, I turned the handle, cold and wet under my fingers, and pushed the door inward, surprised to find that it swung easily, its utter lack of friction incongruent with the age attributed to the property. I had always thought of the fence, and the ruins it contained, as a relic of an ancient era, perhaps only recently left to wild and rot, but it never occurred to me that anyone, not even the caretaker of the square under the tree, would have done anything to maintain the fence.
    Looking down, I saw that my hand was streaked with dark, probably black paint, so I stooped low to wipe it clean in the grass. A footprint, long and wide and filled with a regular pattern of fat Xs, stared up at me from the dirt. Looking up, I saw another, the mirror image of the first, and then a narrow canyon through the dancing grass where those heavy boots pushed down and crushed the wild grass. The tall blades whipped and sliced at my arms and my face as I pushed my way through, following the trail that was slowly fading as the grass that was merely bent, not broken, unfolded, reaching once again toward the ever present moonbow and the twinkling stars.
    Before long I found myself under the somber canopy of the mourning elm, staring into the enigma that had been a fixture in my dreams for as long as I could remember. It was a perfect square of grass, trimmed carefully by some precise machine that left only the faintest parallel impression of wheels, and none of the clippings that Ma's push-mower left in thick drifts. The grass only registered peripherally in my mind, however, because the miser’s square had offered up a new mystery.
    Centered in the well-cared for patch was a simple wooden sign that rose only a little past my knees, which were already as long as they were ever going to get. In the pale moonbowlight, the fresh white paint shone with a life of its own, but the lettering was painted with something so dark it seemed to devour the light that fell on it, making the words very hard to read.
    Kneeling in the soft grass, so much softer and more civilized than the wild grass I waded through to find this place, I leaned forward until my nose was almost touching the glistening paint, the smell something almost indescribable; sweet but sharp and bitter at the same time.
    Two words slowly resolved in my sight; words written in the old language so their meaning only reluctantly appeared in my mind: “NEVER FORGET.” If anything else had ever been painted there, I would never know, because it looked very much as if the sign had been repainted hundreds of times, its bottom edge jagged with stalactites of dried white paint that almost reached to the ground.       
    Below, almost hidden among a thousand drops of paint, was a withered corpse I thought was a snake. Leaning closer, the delicious smell of cut grass and earth filling my nose, the snake became a loop of rotting rope, just like the length that dangled above, with a knot forming a thick, tight spiral like a pair of fists held together. It looked particularly evil, even though I had never seen a noose at that point in my young life, so I quickly got up, brushing dirt off my arms and legs, and went the way I came. I bicycled all that night, and countless nights after that, doing what I could to put food in my mouth when I was hungry, and new clothes on my back when the clothes I wore fell apart, until, at long last, the mirrored towers of this city appeared on the horizon, twinkling red and orange in the light of dawn.
    Years passed, as I built a life and a place for myself in the city, until one day, on my way back home to the apartment I shared then with a dozen others like me, I heard a voice playing through an ancient display, a voice at once new and so strangely familiar. I asked an old man standing and watching with me who the well-dressed man on the screen was. The old man looked at me for a moment through milky eyes, and then chuckled.
    “You don’t know H_______? He’s the one that shattered the moon. Prob’ly been dead a thousand years now.”
    "A thousand years?"
    "Give 'r take. You know, you look a bit like 'im."
    I stood while the city continued its frenetic beat around me, even after the old man with the milky eyes wandered off, still chuckling to himself. I stood, watching the loop of H_______ play over and over again, memorizing his face. Someday, when I meet him again, under the light of the moonbow, I will tell him that I haven’t forgotten; that I will never forget.

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