My mother’s brother, the uncle I never knew,
Died in a bus wreck on June 24, 1946.
I was ten months old.
Survivors told how the bus
Was heading west on US 10, now Interstate 90,
Barely on the Seattle side of Snoqualmie Pass
When an eastbound black car swerved into the westbound lane,
And the bus driver swerved into the guard rail to avoid a crash,
Sending the entire Spokane Indians baseball team
Down the flanks of the mountain
And nine of its members to their deaths.
My mother’s brother, my Uncle Bob,
Was among the dead.
Eight of the nine, including Uncle Bob,
Had served in the armed forces
During World War II
And had been welcomed home just months before
Amid relief and jubilation and thanksgiving,
All of it now lost in flames and blood.
The black car continued on its way.
It was never found.
My mother’s father, Josiah Kinnaman, died two weeks later,
Of heartbreak or stroke or alcohol,
Leaving my mother without father and brother
And a yearlong season of anguish,
A calendar spattered with the black Xs of loss
From birthdays to death days
With no holidays from grief.
Only a few months later
I am a kid of three
On a brilliant spring morning,
So sunny and warm
My mother has hung the laundry out to dry
On clotheslines in the back yard.
The sheets are clouds that take the wind
In vast billows above my head.
I have fallen under their spell
And clutch them in my hands,
Marking them with the grubby smears of love.
I remember that perfect April sky
Only because of what came out of it:
My mother, diving through the bedsheet clouds.
My gentle mother transfigured into a warring angel,
Avenging her sullied sheets
In a doomed attempt to claim control
Over a tiniest bit of life,
Descending through clouds of outraged love
Brandishing, not a sword,
But a willow branch.
Suddenly through the billows the avenging angel dives
Aflame with the justice of a betrayed god.
Brandishing a sword, a willow switch
That awakens the boy from infant slumbers
Forever with a whirlwind of willow
Like a fallen angel aflame with rage,
Hurtling through wrath-white billows
Battling the grubby marks on the sun-sweetened sheets,
An angel at war, striking blind
At her baffling scars of rage and grief.
Leaving in her wake
A thin white scar on my inner thigh,
And a spring day bleached white with terror.
The white scar is still there.
The black car was never found.
For a lifetime, I’ve been haunted by
The fury coiled in the heart of the winter willow,
By a secret calendar of black Xs
Hidden from me and known only
By an unspeakable knowledge that springtime
Brings recurring days of high alert,
Nights swarming with black cars
Like bats flickering jet through ink,
Random meals of ash,
Afternoons pacing, watchful for the evil thing
That has already happened,
Already ripped through someone else’s past.
This is how terrorist grief hijacks immortality,
Leaping from mother to son, scar calling out to scar.
Grief, the bastard child of love,
Devours and grows and shits and breeds,
Coils into the DNA, replicates
And spins into life to feel like fate.
The black car was never found,
Hiding itself in the dark sheds
Of the hearts and brains
Of another home.
There it purrs away, spewing fumes,
The deadly secret,
The mystery that streams through the veins
Of generations,
The blood-warm toxin
Children don’t have to be warned against,
All of us born with secret reading skills:
Any kid can con
A secret that has already killed
And hums waiting to kill again.
A white moth flicks across the Christmas table,
A snowflake on a dead breath.
It chills the feast into silence
As it lands on the white cloth.
In the iced silence
It is snow on snow,
Visible only to the most naked eye.
The black car was never found.
Jon Bell 