Down the Hill of Heaven (a Shannon O'Day Sketch)

A Shannon O’Day Story
Down the Hill of Heaven

((Brittle as a Corn Stalk) (1956))




Below him was a barn, and brittle corn stalks, and it looked like the barn had taken the moon and placed it just above its back gable, it made the edges of the gable look silver like, the silo was alongside the barn perhaps fifty-feet to its right. Somehow all this got mixed into Shannon’s dream, even the flat cornfields he had helped his brother harvest—was in his dreaming mode, and down the road a bit, the Country Café, moon lit, and the lights inside the café were wasted, for the moon itself did all the labor in making it look old and in despair. The stars were sparse and scattered—making the sky look thin. And he, Shannon O’Day, was floating like shattered flowers in the wind, a dark wind, being sucked down, from the Hill of Heaven. So he dreamt, and so he felt. And with dust clinging to his damp lips, laying by the creek, alongside the corn stalks of the cornfield—he started choking, coughing, this helped him slowly woke up to reality.
The darkness had cut half the shape line off, of the barn; it was more shadow than barn now. He was gradually becoming awake, sober. He felt, brittle as the corn stalks, and then when he rubbed his eyes, the barn no longer had a shadow at all. Its once heavy shape was lost to the dusty sky, the gray to dark blue, dusty sky, and it all was like a benediction to him, the barn slain by the sky. His muscles had not forgotten the yank and shove and the bending of its body, its long torturous feel of the wooden handle tools he had used all afternoon, his head was now doing an immortal dance to the night demigods.
Among the creek’s shadows was a frog, he tried to grab it, eat it, but it was quick as a snake, and slid right out of the palms, moist hands, hands that had been sweating all afternoon.
The fifty-six year old Shannon had drunk him-self to sleep after an hour or two before sun down. You could not see the pale limbs on him, and his fingers were stained with formal tobacco, and from his head, as he pushed himself up—came a measured dong of hammering as if his head was part of an anvil.
His body felt his warming blood, felt the night air drawing him into full consciousness. His eyes like cooling blood, under them were black to purple shadows. He must have kicked his shoes off, he was barefoot, he looked about gracefully for them, them grimly.
For a lucid instant, there had been a supernatural beauty behind his eyes (a vision perhaps or a dream, a fragment of one or the other anyhow), which came alive deep in his mind’s eye. How did he get on the Hell of Heaven: did he climb it? He contemplates on this, staring into the sound of the creek. His mind ran awkwardly across the whole dream, as if it was running across whole harvested cornfields of his brother Gus’.
“Nothing happened though…” he told himself; and the night slowly died without a sound about it or a return to the dream, and the shadow of the barn came back, with the sun rising, it now had a rainbow of colors behind it. There was the sun here. He rubbed his eyes again; it was as if they were burning slowly away. He recalled fragments of the dream—actually he wanted to go back to the dream, re-dream the dream all over again, where he left off perchance, and harness it if possible—and then thought: man and the devil can counterfeit most everything except a true vision of the mind, and in his silence he knew no fear, and knew who it was from.

No: 560(1-3-2009) An independent Sketch of Shannon O’Day