Poetry by Kyle McNally

Kyle McNally is a writer of historical fiction and poetry. His work explores folklore, tribalism, and violence in post–Civil War America.

I: The Gum Patch

The gum patch was where they worked. Turpentine was their trade,
The gum that’s boiled down for ships. That was Escambia’s tribute
To the yards; Pensacola, a port re-risen now
From piles of brick and ashes {the year is 1894}
Though there are still hints of her razing; the old men
In cane chairs outside storefronts, cutting plugs, sitting
Together but not talking; one has a polished wood leg,
One a divot in his head where a ball struck,
But all their faces have been old since the war.
Some of the trees hold cannonballs in their wood breasts,
The bark woven round orbs like rusty eyes reliving
The bombardments; fires, corpses floating in the harbor;
Cold, hard steel eyes scorched by fire, like those of the old men
At the stores with their chaws.
And perhaps there is also
An unseen gloom to this place; heavy gloom of defeat,
Or something charged, as the summer sky is before
Its clouds erupt with chain lightning.
In the shipyards here
The timber, milled in Caroline, is jointed, bolted,
The planking steamed and bent into hulls, the boards screaming
In their winches like wild horses being broken,
Though the boards do not break, but are shaped round frameworks
Rising like a temple to some geometric idol;
The shipwrights drumming tempos with their mallets,
And caulkers slathered black with pitch, slathering the pitch
Across seams to bar the shipworm, the seawater,
The black pitch like their own blackness bled into the work,
The memory of this idol that they made.
Then she is masted, sparred, coppered, – but that is shipbuilding;
The gum comes first.
The camp was called No. 3, or Blackwater,
In the pinewoods of Escambia, a lease
Of Brearly & Partners Naval Stores, three-hundred acres
Of forest and sand. The camp, the gum patch, could not be reached
But for a tortuous road, a sugarwhite erasure
Of the saw palmetto scrub, just wide enough for teamsters
To drive their oxes through these ancient halls of trees,
Their wheels sinking in the sugar sand, whips hissing
Overhead, the beasts mad with strain; or a railroad track,
A narrow-gauge line that cut directly to the stillyard.
The stillhouse kept an enormous copper kettle,
A fat joss clothed in bricks and clapboard,
Where men worked in smoke like mystics brewing potions,
And ranks of hogsheads lined the platforms and the skids,
Awaiting their fulfillment with gawped mouths.
The axmen,
Like the land, were leases too, from the penitentiary;
A device of ruined economies after the war,
And abundant prisons.
“We don’t wear fetters har,”
Explained the chief Woodsrider to them, the co. foreman,
Who, with his men, their rifles, looked down from horses
Meant for traces; draught animals that crushed the palmettos
Like paper fronds, and circled the men like living stockades.
“Any of ye niggers wants to have a try, thet thar’s the way,”
He said, and swept his hand across the woods, which seemed half-realized
Here, the trunks sparse, tenuous; though in the distance
They accumulated in one closely-woven mass,
A black wall.
“Thar’s panthers yander,” said the Woodsrider,
“Gators, snakes, muskhogs n’ ague. Pison-vine thet’ll hash ye up
Better’n I could.”
He leaned, ejected a squirt
Of brown chaw, like the gum, from out his moustaches.
“I don’t reckon we’d see y’all arter thet,” he said,
And smiled like a player looking over his chessmen,
Satisfied.
“But if any y’all should run, n’ take a notion
To come back….”
He trailed off here, and looked like a man stopping
Just before a precipice, until his eyes blacked
With destructive intent.
“Then I swar ‘t now,
I’ll have ye missin’ them ol’ woods like they was yer
Mammy’s tits.”
His riflemen sniggered at the fear
They saw in the faces of the axgang.
The Woodsrider took his hat off a crown as bald
And smooth as eggshell, even though his face was like carved wood,
To wipe sweat that already sparkled in the predawn haze.
“Yassir,” he decided, and looked out there into the east;
Up at the tall trees where the Dog Star shone obstinately,
Despite the brightening sky.
“We in God’s prison.”

They followed the Woodsrider like peasant revolutionaries
Armed with axes, “hacks” to box the trees, “pullers”
To scrape the dried resin, misery whip saws, drawknives,
Adzes to clear the sand and the wild scrub; some slung
With yokes and dangling buckets like the very beasts
That trailed them, pulling drays that would take the barreled gum
Back to the stillyard in the night when they were finished.
But the sun, when they began, was at the bottom
Of the sky, a red ember burning away mists
That clung to the forest like a memory of stillness,
A time before men and axes, though it already screamed
With the noise of locusts; noise that surges, ebbs, but never
Stops. The sun bled its light through the slashpines in fans,
Seeding the scrub palmettos with red glints which seemed
Somehow to tell of history, or perhaps
There would yet be a history; and around them,
A conclave, were the faces of the trees, bone white
Where they had been flayed of bark. Here the sap bled into tin cups,
“Yearling boxes” that swallowed the gum, drip by drip,
Like so many amber tears, a tedious process,
Until the face could cry no longer, and the tree
Would wither and die. As far as could be seen these faces
Lingered like ancient remnants of a ritual ground,
That of the Creeks maybe, or Pensacolas,
Whose presence still seemed real; as if they would wander
Out these mists and shadows of the woods, in their
Bright heathen regalia, headcloths, capes, with rings
In their noses like the ones bulls have, holding to lances,
Solicitous, as the Conquistadors saw them, –
But Conquistadors, Creeks, Pensacolas, all
Have been gone for a century. In these woods even today
There are trees, long dead, with streaked scars down their trunks,
And rusted yearling boxes tacked below, gripped now
By the creep of old wood before it died, as corpses
On a battlefield still hold to the embedded blades
That killed them.
Now the men set down their tools here
In the white sand, sticky with gum, their bare feet rough
And sticking, though some who were resourceful wore brogans,
Others store-clothes, shirts and trousers that had clothed many lives,
Many thrashing, caged hearts, because to bury these
Would be a waste, and besides, – the foul stink of death
Hung over the camp like stillyard smoke, and the duds
Of a dead man were better than the shredded prison stripes
They came in.
There was one among this gang
Called Stinson, sent up for vagrancy; a perfect crime
For the gum patches that needed axmen, and the prisons
That did not need prisoners, though he was guilty
Of real crimes, Stinson, unpunished yet by Justice,
Who often guesses; he liked to sing. The Woodsrider
Asked him what song he had to-day, to keep time for the axes,
A marshalling beat.
“I ketch me any ol’ song
You wants, boss,” Stinson said to the Woodsrider. “Yes, suh.”
He set a foot on his bush ax and pushed his weight;
The bark came apart like a crust.
“You wants you a
Laughin’ song? A weckin’ song? A coon song?”
“None thet,”
Said the Woodsrider. The white man turned to consult
The gold woods, a beauty he admired cautiously.
“Sing one from the scriptures,” he decided.
“O! yes, suh,”
Stinson said, “You knows I kotched me all sorts.”
He stopped,
Breathed in the music that shines over all the land
Like fireflies, a shining doom, – happy doom of the South!
The Belle who wears her sunshine like a killer’s smile,
Her gay adornments with cynicism; like the
Paddle steamboats, frilled with gingerbread, that once ploshed
Her Mississip’, and slid poison into her lowland heart,
Load by load, while chained black feet jangled on the deckplanks
To the tooting of shrill steam calliopes.
Stinson, hearing these things, breathed, and knew what it all meant
When he began to sing with the voice of the Belle.
He called this a weary land, weary land, weary land,
And sang that God was his rock. The other hands joined in
And kept tempo with their tools; the sounds of the morning
Were lost beneath their dirge, a great collective loss.
The Woodsrider closed his eyes and listened, remembering
How the doomful Belle had hurt him too, though she was beautiful, –
But who was this not singing? This hand’s chipping, out of time,
Was offensive to the Woodsrider; he must be dizzy
With the sunstroke.
“Ain’t ye like to sang, boy?” the Woodsrider
Asked. Still, the hand kept chipping. He was a new hand,
Still in wretched prison stripes, the black stripes faded grey,
The white to rancid yellow; though he had improvised
A hat from a palmetto frond and string, which waggled
Down his back like a warbonnet.
“You, boy!”
“He don’ talk, boss’m.”
“Don’t he?”
“Nah, suh. Ain’t never talked none in the jail-house.
Not fo’ two yar.”
The Woodsrider studied the hand, confused.
“He stupid?”
“Don’ know, boss’m. S’posin’ so.”
“Well. He deef?”
“Ain’t deef, boss’m. He jes’ don’ talk none.”
“Well.”
The hand kept at his work, impervious
To the Woodsrider’s fascination.
“He Railroad Time, boss,”
Stinson guffawed. “Mus’ got he a train to ketch!”
This did not amuse the Woodsrider as it did Stinson.
The other guards on their horses looked about, giddy
Over the hand’s insolence. All at once the Woodsrider
Ripped his rifle from its saddlescabbard, shouldered it,
Chucked the lever hard with a mechanical champ,
And silenced all but the screaming locusts. The hand
Now stopped his work {all the gang had stopped their work} to rise
Slowly, and face the Woodsrider, his gun, the beady glare
Of its hard fouled iron. The Woodsrider, from his vantage,
Was shocked by what he saw beyond his sights;
Two holes in a face like a man’s face, but unlit, –
Yet was this not a man’s face? These eyes must needs be “hoo-doos”
Like the kind whispered of on old plantations by slaves
Who read fortunes in snake bones, – but of course that was plumb
Slave foolishness; nothing but a damned fool nigger,
This hand. The Woodsrider withdrew his rifle,
Set the butt on his thigh, though he kept his finger ready
On the trigger, lest he need it.
“Looky thet,” he said.
“He heared me jest fine.”