Broadhurst [short-short story]
Lying on his right side upon the porch boards, Broadhurst, as best he could manage, propped himself up with his left arm; and then, craning over the daisies his Clair had planted that spring, he watched the large red sun, one last time, drop beneath the plains — for surely tonight, he thought, the nightingales would sing.
Letting his head back down, Broadhurst thought of old Peddler Jew, from years back, who had told him once — while conversing over cups of cider after a haggle over door hinges — that “there are no nightingales in the Americas, my friend.”
But Clair had always called them ‘our nightingales’ — the birds that, for a late September week, had, of an eve, annually and faithfully, sang for them from the willow down by the creek.
With his left foot Broadhurst pushed against the post and began the ordeal of getting himself off from the porch, down onto the ground. When this was accomplished, he reached up and spilled the can of kerosene onto the boards and onto the lighted lantern — before rolling himself away.
From a distance, he watched as the flames consumed the cabin — which he had built for Clair forty-three years afore, with lumber he had wagoned in himself from Missouri.
After a time, by the light of the fire, well-practiced now, Broadhurst rolled his body down to the rise above the creek, fifty yards away — there, to await the nightingales’ song.
It had taken Broadhurst three days to remove the still loose, separating soil from atop Clair’s coffin — it being but two weeks since he had lain her to sleep, just four feet down, as was her wish, upon their long-ago lost son.
On his back, now, by the opened grave, confronted by the cosmos, Broadhurst waited — and when it finally came, with his left arm he rolled himself over, to slip down upon his Clair, and their William — and together, that eve, they listened to the nightingales’ song.
After the shot rang out, the startled birds took to flight — but very soon they were back in the tree, again singing.
In October, a young couple on the lookout for a place to settle found Broadhurst’s note, stuck low on the willow — written in a childlike scrawl:
“To the first Christian man to find this, I beg of you, sir, a kindly favor. Two week ago, my lovely wife, my Clair, left this earth, and me, alone. Five days later, I awoke of a morn just half a man, no longer able to control one side of my body. It may be wrong, sir, but I took it as a sign that me and my Clair, we were needing one another, and so I have decided to join her in eternity, along with our child. So, if you would, with the shovel by the tree, please lay the sod over us. P.S. There’s plenty of good nails to be had in the burnt cabin up yonder, and you are welcomed to them.”
