Natural-Gas Boom, Windfall, Indiana Poem

It was a kind of rhythm, ‘ she said, stirring
ever so slightly in the porch swing, until
it creaked to a stop. I could not quite see her –
interval of first firefly, evening star.

‘I was ten years old when they discovered it.
Towns with five hundred people shot up
to five thousand. They thought the millennium
had come, that the gas would last forever.

‘They walked with a swagger – proud of the way
they wasted it. They let the streetlamps burn
night and day. Too much trouble to hire a man
to go around and put them out each morning.’

She was silent for a moment. It was long ago.
‘My stepmother had my father sign up to pay
for workmen to run a pipe out to our side yard,
to give light. A dollar a month. It was called

a flambeau. It was never supposed to go out..
For an innocent farm girl, it was like the pillar
of smoke by day and fire by night that led Moses
and the children of Israel to the promised land.’

She had spoken of that house before. How once,
a photographer came, and posed father, stepmother,
her own brother, Glen, her two stepbrothers
and her stepsister, with the house behind them.

She recalled her father wore a Democratic badge;
it must have been about the time of Cleveland’s
second inaugural. And the boys, how they fancied
long mustaches, waxed and curled, like those

of villains they saw in plays at the opera house.
Her stepmother wound her hands in her best apron.
My grandmother wore a new straw hat and gloves.
I never saw the photo, it was lost before I was born.

Sometimes she talked about it – how expectant
they all looked, standing there. The gas would
continue to flow for ten more years, forming
a ring of factories and foundries – a vast globe,

a web of energy hovering over the farmlands,
casting no shadow. ‘I remember, ‘ she went on,
‘how cold it was, that last morning, when the gas
finally gave out. Our flambeau had shut down.

We looked across the fields, toward town,
and everything was dark. The boom was over.
We heard people calling out, all that way –
they were ruined. They had lost everything.’

Another silence. An evening chill had come on.
I sensed, for the first time, that the photographer
had made sure the house screened the flambeau
in the side yard – that what she remembered,

what she noticed, even in the way they posed,
back when they thought it would last forever –
how her three brothers seemed so cocky,
how she had clung to her stepsister’s arm –

all of that was backlit by an elusive glow,
as though, standing behind them, invisible
in that earthly garden, some presence, terrible
and unforgiving, was about to lift its sword.

She had never been one for quoting scripture,
but she knew the stories. ‘Moses followed after
the pillar of fire, ‘ she said. ‘But in the end,
he was not allowed to enter the promised land.’

It was late. She adjusted the frayed afghan
about her shoulders. The calls of katydids
and tree frogs had grown louder. She tapped
my hand. ‘It’s time for us to go inside.’