Anyce Shepherd behind the counter of her tiny country, Rambler’s Rest. She was known to her grandchildren and many others as Mama Shepherd. Her husband was murdered in 1938 when she had five children and was pregnant with the sixth. She had to close the store during World War 2 because she could not stock it; she shocked the neighborhood by holding dances—she needed the income to feed her children.
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Dead Men Share
No pickled eggs, no pickled beans, no leather britches strung by the stovepipe on the wall, no onions dried in the sun, no fatback and crowder peas steaming in a cracked bowl, no belly-white cabbages to dig up from a dark hole in the dark ground. No ain’t got nothin’ to say with the sharp tongue they ain’t got when the wife they don’t have asks, What troubled that empty mind? No pot to piss in or step- ant to piss on, no brush to pull and tear the whining daughter-they-don’t-have’s thick hair. No end of nothings, no day to end night, not even night to wake up from, unless what the worms do not say is true of the last trump’s blowing, first softly, not to alarm sleeping sinners, then loud as the cock, yes, Jesus, that will rattle their grave’s own windows, yes, Lord, and shake open their grave’s doors, hallelujah, and they will find their own place on the right or left hand of God, praised be the name they cannot say. No fear of rising through the pale stalk of the dandelion, of scattering from its cloudy head like smoke. No burden to pick up, no heart to let down, no skin to feel the touch of day. |