The Lonesomest Sound in the World

Start by rounding up the usual suspects. There’s Hank Williams’s lonesome whippoorwill,
making everybody who’s ever heard it cry. There’s his wife, Audrey, kicking Hank out every
time he says he’s stopped drinking, and him asking to come home, but then drinking again,
lonesome as he is. There’s the night she kicks him out for the very last time, Hank telling her he
won’t last another year, and sure enough he doesn’t. While you’re at it, round up every mourning
dove there ever was, even the ones still learning to master the whisper, the pause, that slow
rolling sigh. And round up every lover’s name cried out under heat lightning skies, Maisie or
Jasmine or Kerry or Kitty or Sweet Baby Blue. And don’t forget that shot heard round the world,
and every bloody shot that came after that. Or the kid on the beach at Normandy with his guts
hanging out, trying to push them back inside himself, crying, Momma, Momma, because he
understands now, for sure, that he’s going to die. Or the single-engine Cessna flying along
the coastline, looking for someone, maybe looking for you, the sound going in and out as it flies.
Or every wish you’ve ever made to find your heart’s true home, all of them leaving this place
and then falling back like little silver knives.

Or the Jolly house on Old Poorhouse Lane, where the whole family lived, all five of them, while
Mr. Jolly tried to finish it before winter closed in. But the snow came early, and they had to
hunker down in the cellar with half of a roof, and tar paper rolls hanging down. When the kids
came to school, we tortured them because they smelled and wore the same clothes every day,
until they just shut down, not even looking at us after a while, never raising their hands, never
saying a word. And in the spring when Mr. Jolly started framing the first floor, he never got far
with that either. One day I guess he simply gave up, joined the lost army of failed fathers, until
finally the Jollys moved away. We broke all the windows then, my brothers and me, throwing
stones like David at Goliath. I remember the glass shattering, how we laughed, our joy never
quelled. I wanted the family to know, no matter where they ended up, no one would like them,
that none of them would ever be held. I wanted them to see the stones raining down while they
hugged the ground, their hands covering their faces. That kind of lonesome. The lonesomest kind.