"Dad?"
Only then did I realize I'd made no response.
"Are you going to be okay?"
Of course I would be, in time.
"You shouldn't be out here by yourself. Come on into town and stay with me, just for tonight."
But I declined, insisting that being by myself was exactly what I needed right now.
Again and again people say everything's a blur at these times, but it's not. For all that it happens fast, each single moment takes forever to uncoil in your mind, each image is clear and separate and rimed with light. Somewhere in my memory Val will always be sitting there slumped forward in the chair with a surprised expression on her face pointing to the spilled wine.
Lonnie showed up not long after, then Don Lee with Doc Oldham in tow. At one point Lonnie threatened to slap cuffs on me and haul my ass back to town if he had to. He didn't carry through on it, though. Most of us don't carry through; that's one of the things you can usually count on.
Eldon was the last to turn up, after the rest had gone, even Nathan-though for all I knew, Nathan was still out there skulking. Eldon sat on the edge of the porch.
"I'm sorry, man," he said.
"We all are."
"You have no idea."
I didn't have much of anything.
"Rain heading this way."
"Good."
After a moment he said, "I loved her, John."
After a moment I said, "I know you did."
"What the hell are we gonna do now, man?"
"You're going to go on, to Texas and all those places you two had talked about, and you're going to play and sing the songs you and Val always did together."
I went in and got the banjo.
"She told me you were learning to play."
"I don't think you can call what the banjo and I do together play. It's more of an adversary relationship."
When I handed it to him, he said, "I can't take this."
"Sure you can. It needs to be played, it needs to be allowed to do what it was made for."
We argued about it some more, and finally he agreed. "Okay, I'll take it, I'll even learn to play the thing. But it's not mine."
"That's what Val always said: that instruments don't belong to people, we just borrow them for a while."
"What about you? What are you going to do?"
I'm going to sit here on this porch, I told him. And once he was gone that's what I did, sat there on the porch looking out into the trees and back at the label on the wine bottle and thinking about the ragged edges of my life. About daybreak I saw Miss Emily walking at wood's edge with young ones in a line behind her. "Val," I said aloud, and as her name came back to me in echo from the trees it sounded very much like a prayer.
Somewhere deep inside myself I'm still sitting there, waiting.