BORDERLANDS

by Robert R. Carson Jr.

The ancient shed,
right behind the soft red old brick antebellum relic, itself rescued from oblivion by a suicidal writer, transplanting himself from New England teacher back to his Kentucky past, seeking reincarnation as Southern gentleman farmer writer, attracted by the white Faulkner pillar facade still standing at the end of the long drive and the remains of glory past, the cavernous front parlours where a sharecropper used to camp, the master bedroom on the second story, floors sagging from the wet weight of silage pumped up there, and the maids' quarters, chicken infested, stairs up or down long since gone,

Once a barracks building,
for whom long forgotten now housing the manure spreader bought by Mr. Robert and a slumping tool bench, oil besotted remnant of a 50's bowling alley, the rusty tongue of a wood-wheeled hay wagon vice-gripped at the end, where old Jim greases the bright green Deere machinery that keeps things moving, slowly,

Maybe former kitchen quarters too,
home to masterful cooks with primitive means, slaves freed to slave some more, now just behind the custom-cabineted kitchen. tacked on, plotted there where the local man fell to his death trying to repair the slate of the oldest part, old and new close by, the land where lung dying cash crop tobacco grew, now fallow fields of home-grown cattle, if not sink hole swallowed, shipped for fattening to richer Midwest ranges,

But the old place a cool place,
musty in its darkness for old Jim, where he meets with Mr. Robert mid morning before the noon day heat to talk quite comfortably about their work ahead, safe from the onslaught of harsh burning sun beneath the shineless tin, with just one window, admitting little light and no clear view of Mabry Farm, and though the slate brown, gnarly-knotted planks end like rotten daggers digging deep into termite soil,

This fine sad shed lives on
where old Jim long labors, himself a survivor too, long past retirement but deep dug also in the dirt, upright church elder, for tax-free dollars to feed rotting offspring and simply to carry on, keep the old place going from time to time, before dawn to sundown.