He nodded over his work. She kissed him on the cheek. He reached up and patted her chin. “Know what, lady?”
“What?”
“I think I like you, yes, sir, I think I like you.”
She shook him. “Don’t go to sleep, David, don’t.”
“Want to sleep. Want to sleep.”
“Later, darling. When you’ve finished your poem, your last great poem, the very finest one, David. Listen to me—”
He fumbled with the pen. “What’ll I say?”
She smoothed his hair, touched his cheek with her fingers and kissed him, tremblingly. Then, closing her eyes, she began to dictate.
“There lived a fine man named David and his wife’s name was Lisa and—”
The pen moved slowly, achingly, tiredly forming words.
“Yes?” he prompted.
“—and they lived in a house in the garden of Eden—”
He wrote again, tediously. She watched.
He raised his eyes. “Well? What’s next?”
She looked at the house, and the night outside, and the wind returned to sing in her ears and she held his hands and kissed his sleepy lips.
“That’s all,” she said, “the ink is drying.”
The publishers from New York visited the valley months later and went back to New York with only three pieces of paper they had found blowing in the wind around and about the raw, scarred, empty valley.
The publishers stared at one another, blankly:
“Why, why, there was nothing left at all,” they said. “Just bare rock, not a sign of vegetation or humanity. The home he lived in—gone! The road, everything! He was gone! His wife, she was gone, too! Not a word out of them. It was like a river flood had washed through, scraping away the whole countryside! Gone! Washed out! And only three last poems to show for the whole thing!”
No further word was ever received from the poet or his wife. The Agricultural College experts traveled hundreds of miles to study the starkly denuded valley, and went away, shaking their heads and looking pale.
But it is all simply found again.
You turn the pages of his last small thin book and read the three poems.
She is there, pale and beautiful and immortal, you smell the sweet warm flash of her, young forever, hair blowing golden upon the wind.
And next to her, upon the opposite page, he stands gaunt, smiling, firm, hair like raven’s hair, hands on hips, face raised to look about him.
And on all sides of them, green with an immortal green, under a sapphire sky, with the odor of fat wine grapes, with the grass knee-high and bending to touch of exploring feet, with the trails waiting for any reader who takes them, one finds the valley, and the house, and the deep rich peace of sunlight and of moonlight and many stars, and the two of them, he and she, walking through it all, laughing together, forever and forever.
The End
