Free Jolly by John Weston Page B

and undisturbed by moonlight, where they—Jolly and Jamie—had pulled the still gasping body of Mickey Fernandez out by his ankles one afternoon and watched, frenzied, as his eyes rolled back under the curls on his forehead, and he died in the wet reeds at their feet.
     
    So just to save a fight,
    And make everything all right,
    I’ll meet my Mary by the zoo, you see.
     
    The hill behind Old Lady Decker’s cheerless hermitage, eroded, its few trees growing at angles from the clay, where each summer the torrential rains disemboweled another of her ancestors to send his bones and decayed cottonwood coffin slithering down into the road where they remained except for what the dogs scavenged until someone called for a county official who shoveled them onto his truck and drove away, where, no one asked.
     
    On Monday I’ll have Mary by the camels,
    That’s the place that Mary oughta be,
     
    The lame fieldstone house where the two simple sisters, Clara and Eva, had lived alone since long before their memory when they were not out foraging in someone’s apple orchard or melon field and who bought a new gas stove when there had never been electricity to Skull Valley much less gas and who walked to their nearest neighbors every day for assistance in lighting the stove.
     
    Tuesday by the bears,
    Wednesday by the hares,
     
    The general store shrinking with age nevertheless as indominable as its mistress who operated it before, during, and after four husbands in succession, the last of whom died of pneumonia from lying on his back in the rain to tinker with the undersides of his jalopy, and which housed a cache of out-priced candy and soda pop—fascinating to the eyes of a child who never tasted of either except at Christmas—as well as a minute post office for persons who could afford a dollar a month for the privilege of twisting a brass combination lock or who otherwise had to ask for their mail at the barred window providing the proprietess was not busy in another part of the store.
     
    Thursday by the deer, my dear, you see.
     
    The stone bridge over Kirkland Creek spanning an ordinarily dry bed of sand that two or three times a year raged and foamed about the ankles of a small boy who had to cross it two miles farther down on his way home from school in the company of his older brother, who scoffed at the treachery of the water until one spring one of his own friends was surprised while in the middle of the creek bed by the four-foot tumble of muddy water roaring down upon him from the mountains and whose arms flung over his head were little defense against the maelstrom that carried his body seventeen miles and three days and left it like a hapless yearling butchered in a barbed wire cage beside the creek.
     
    On Friday I’ll have Mary by the monkies,
    Swingin’ on her little rings of brass,
     
    The little green-roofed cabin, now tilting precariously toward the creek bed where clubfooted Harry Band—called Bandy by the adults and Harry the Happy Homo by Jamie and the big boys—had lived for ten years content to do part-time work in the general store for his meals and lodging until he was found one morning in his cabin unclothed, his head bashed in with his own specially-built shoe by a passing hobo, some thought, although a coffee can of small bills and change sat undisturbed on a bedside table and it could have been any one of several young men to whom Bandy offered a drink and affection.
     
    On Saturday I’ll have Mary by the donkies,
    That’s the time that I’ll have
    Mary by the ass!
     
    The white stucco school—its two long rooms divided by a central hall that ended where the bell rope hung down awaiting as reward to a well-behaved boy or girl heavy enough to turn the great rusted bell—whose wrought iron and wooden-topped desks held the ink and knife cuts of a thousand secrets and spring agonies—whose thin-worn chalkboards had felt the thrill of words and the terror of numbers transmitted to