A poem by Mary Patterson Thornburg

“The saddest poem in the world”

Where I was born has faded from your maps.
Homestake, Montana. Even its name has drifted
Like smoke from a ruined chimney, out
Through the tall sagebrush, through the long, silent years.

When I was eight years old my mother died
In childbed with a child that would not be born.
On the shack’s dirt floor, my father
Cursed and howled. In my own bed past weeping
I lay until daybreak and the sound of his spade
Turning the rocky soil. The time before
That time is gone beyond my saying,
Yet it was real once. Fire blazed on the hearth,
Stew bubbled in the black pot, I could hear
My mother singing.

My father kept me as long as he could,
Taught me to work, taught me to be a man,
But when the work ran out he left Montana.
He meant to send and get me, I believe,
And if he had I would have gone to him
And none of this would be. But he did not.
The day he left, the neighbor took me
Down to Twin Bridges to the Orphans’ Home.

Two years I wintered there,
Summered on dusty haying crews
In snaky river meadows, waiting to hear
At first from my father, later waiting for someone
To see me working hard and wish to keep me.
And then, in nineteen-four, Mr. Levi Beecham
Came for me to be his son. He wanted
An honest boy, cheerful and strong; they said
For me to get my coat and go with him.
The day I left there, I had just turned twelve.

From Twin Bridges to Dillon the road was clear.
We stayed that night in a warm house in town;
I had a feather bed all to myself, and in the morning
We took the train to Lima. Lester Beecham
Met us there with old Jim and the wagon.
Snow was falling before we reached the ranch
At Magdalen in the Centennial Valley.
“Here we are home now,” Lester said,
And from that day for near two years it was
My home. Some called me Edward Beecham, some
Edward Lunger, the Beechams’ orphan boy.
Old Mrs. Beecham sometimes called me son
For all her sons but Les were grown.
The kindest of them all was Miss Russell Bean,
Mrs. Beecham’s hired girl who was to marry
The foreman on the P and O,
Down on the Blacktail. She called me Little Ed
And sent molasses cookies out to the bunkhouse
Winter evenings after supper
For Les and me. Sometimes I used to think
When I grew up that there might be
Somebody like Miss Russell singing
In the kitchen, setting the bread to cool.
Time led me sweetly then
And where it led I had no way of knowing.

Time was unfenced, unfettered as the country.
The Valley shone, the lake glittered, the wild
Mountains to the south gave deer and elk,
In winter the sun rode pale along the Divide
And sank into the hills beyond Monida.
Summers were best, when the cowboys hired on
And days began before sunup
With breakfast and then branding, roping, breaking
The wild string, and roundups, and after supper
On Saturdays the fiddles and the dancing,
And Sundays sleeping late, going to prayers
After the sun was high, for Mr. Beecham
Was a Christian man and kept the Lord’s commandment.
Summers were best until a day
In August, nineteen-six, a day my years
Had brought me to at last.

The sun had risen
Bright on the eastern rim. Miss Russell
In a blue dress, her hair up like a lady,
Singing at the cookstove, broke off her song
To send me out where the red hen had hidden
Her nest. Out in the yard there
I saw the shadow of a circling hawk,
And Mr. Mark Bean, shading his eyes
Toward the east, made out against the sky
A shape of wings that was to doom my life.
“Edward,” he called, “run in and get the gun!
Back in the kitchen, behind the door,
I felt the smooth of wood, the cool of iron.
I stood on tiptoe, strained to a man’s height
And took it down. It was a hammerless
Double-barreled shotgun, loaded in both
Barrels, the safety off. I heard her singing
Then, in her low voice like my mother’s voice.
The song she sang was “Down in the Willow Garden.”
I felt the gun stock slip and tried to catch it.

The doctor started out from Idaho Falls
An hour late. The train was an hour late.
They loaded a feather bed into the wagon
And took her to meet the train that was
An hour late. The load of shot
Had struck her right leg just behind the knee.
They said it tore her right leg off. They said
She told her brother to tell me not to mind,
That it was not my fault. She died
Before the train got in. They said
Her blood ran through the mattress and the wood
Of the wagon bed into the dust of the road.

That was on Sunday. Monday the wind turned cold
Out of the west. Tuesday forenoon they brought her
In snow and sleet back to the Jones Cemetery
Beside the lake to bury her. Mr. Beecham
Took me on Wednesday back to the Orphans’ Home
Down in Twin Bridges. I told a man
In Dillon how it had been, and watched him write
His story for the paper, the Dillon Tribune.
The matron told me that my name
Was written in the paper with all the others.
It stands there still, should any wish to see it.

I have been gone a long time now. All you
Who live on the earth are strangers to me
And I to you; my grave is lost, my dust,
Blown with the dust of ages dead as I,
Rises beneath your wheels and settles slowly.
What’s left of me is this. I was a boy
Who had a home and lost it
Through an act I could not see nor stop
Nor yet undo
Through all the years before, the years to come,
The endless sand that falls through the endless glass.
The shadow of a hawk, a woman singing,
The smooth stock slipping through my hand,
The train an hour late.

Editor’s note: Mrs. Thornburg has assured me that this is a true story. She and Thomas, her husband, on one long trip across the Montana plain, sought out and found the grave of Miss Russell and drank a toast to her before traveling on their way. Thomas firmly believes this to be the saddest poem ever written.

.