CHAPTER 3 - Part III
The buds were tight on the maple boughs,
The mud still froze each night,
When I noticed it’d been three days since I
Last noticed their window light.
And before I knew what the matter was
I knew it was not all right.
And before I knew what the matter was,
And before I had dared to knock,
I knew I’d hear no more answer from
That house than from solid rock.
But I didn’t expect the front door to be
So open, and so unlocked.
I didn’t expect to find the place
As empty as orderly.
With not a speck out of place to show
Where John, where Syd might be.
As if their home were a cage, and they
Had managed to wiggle free.
I locked the door with the stray spare key
Syd left on the kitchen floor.
I spread the word to a couple friends.
What could I have done more?
Than to close the door on the empty house
On which time had closed the door.
Nobody heard a word from Syd,
And certainly not from John.
Nobody had the first idea
Whither they both had gone.
Best to forget, we townsfolk said.
Best just to move along.
Best just to move along, and time
Had moving along to do.
And seasons passed as they always pass,
Till half a year became two.
And days when we thought of Syd and John,
As far as we knew, were through.
Spring she passed, and summer he passed,
And autumn brought usual news:
A dust storm blown, a Wall Street crash,
A senator’s son recused,
And a broker robbed, three states away
In a town called New Syracuse.
And a steamboat robbed, two states away
At a fork of the Missouri,
And only a state away, a bank
In a town called Gethsemane,
And if any but I had more than a guess
Then never a word reached me.
Autumn was nearly long enough
That I almost forgot again.
It’s hard to remember the world outside
In this town of lonely men.
But winter blew into town with Syd
And John, who was His Dear Friend.
The money was piled on the pantry floor,
The guns on a kitchen chair.
In a house that was once next door but three
And now was a bandit’s lair,
And it took too long to find my voice
Or do anything but stare.
John stared at me as a beast would stare
At one lost in the wilderness.
And aye, I feared for my life indeed,
It shames me to confess,
But John only turned to Syd and said,
“He came. You were right, I guess.”
Syd, he was suddenly once again
Who I’d known my whole life through.
And suddenly he was entirely tales
Of the things he had dared to do
The brighter his face grew in telling them,
The brighter John’s face grew too.
Oh, the tales he dared to tell me then
And swore me to never repeat,
Of midnight flight to the county line,
Of gunshots out in the street,
Of ever another getaway,
Of never a sole defeat.
Oh the sins he dared to confess to me
Which I repeat not at all, I swear.
Oh the terrible freedom of a world
When you do whatever you dare
In the reprobate’s life that John had lived
And Syd had longed to share.
And oh the way John looked at him
With every tale Syd told,
As a weary man looks, at a crackling hearth,
Who has just come in from the cold.
I’d almost have said he cared nothing for
Stolen banker’s gold.
I brought them some food, for the house had none.
I made them a makeshift bed.
And God knows the things I wished to say
Though none of them I said.
But how many times could these many tales
Have ended with one of them dead?
“Whatever you’ve done,” I finally said
“With whatever you’ve gotten away,
What a relief to leave it behind,
And have somewhere safe to stay.
For now you have riches secure enough
To last to your very last day.”
“The riches are nothing,” Syd shook his head
“I’ll stay here not one day more.
And only the day that’s the final day
Mean I to I return” he swore.
“For I tell you this: The past is a cage,
And time is a closing door.”
“But the money-”
“The money was never the point,”
Said Syd, to his Dear Friend John.
“Together we are, and together we’ll be,
And together we’re moving on.”
They bade me goodnight and they sent me back me home.
Come morning, they were gone.
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