Nobody knows this but your father
once hit Stacker Lee upside the head
with a paving stone. He was better known
for hitting the basso notes in “Nearer, My God, to Thee”
at the funerals of his friends, and for hitting the ribs,
kidneys, ears, and jaws of other
Missouri middleweights, and of your mother,
his mistresses, his dog. “A Pug Who Thumps Women,”
the Post-Dispatch called him (pug for pugilist,
I gather, from the Latin for clenched fist).
He always managed to talk himself clear
of consequence, with some glib
alibi the judge was amused to hear.
He never hit you, as far as I know, which isn’t far.
Instead he carried you into the back yard
because you’d vomited again
and shook you clear of your little life.
“If that’s a child,” a neighbor told his wife,
“the man has killed it,” and so he had.
You were a bright but delicate lad, allegedly,
mild, with a mysterious softness to your bones
that reads like rickets to me, but wouldn’t they have known?
They fed you only soft, mild things, rice and potatoes,
which you ate readily, according to
this suspect, rubbernecked reportage.
The deputy coroner drew a line
through “Congenital Debility” and jotted
“Cause of Death Unknown” above it.
You giggled and suffered for 14 months and haven’t
suffered since the summer of 1892,
little Victor. Senior to my great-grandfathers, you
are what? Only an antique baby, broken,
and the imperceptible ripples you must have sent
across the surface of things, wherever they went.
They buried you in Potter’s Field,
universal for a stranger’s grave, although
the two words together evoke, for me, a garden.
Nothing connects us but having briefly lived.
I’m setting this down, as they say, because
I’m the only one who knows
your name and it has become a burden.
—Eric McHenry
Eric McHenry is a professor of English at Washburn University and a past poet laureate of Kansas. His most recent book is Odd Evening.
