Труман Капоте (user)Truman Capote. The grass harp
For miss Sook Faulk
In memory of affections deep and true
One
When was it that first I heard of the grass harp? Long before the
autumn we lived in the China tree; an earlier autumn then; and of course it
was Dolly who told me, no one else would have known to call it that, a grass
harp.
If on leaving town you take the church road you soon will pass a
glaring hill of bonewhite slabs and brown burnt flowers: this is the Baptist
cemetery. Our people, Talbos, Fenwicks, are buried there; my mother lies
next to my father, and the graves of kinfolk, twenty or more, are around
them like the prone roots of a stony tree. Below the hill grows a field of
high Indian grass that changes color with the seasons: go to see it in the
fall, late September, when it has gone red as sunset, when scarlet shadows
like firelight breeze over it and the autumn winds strum on its dry leaves
sighing human music, a harp of voices.
Beyond the field begins the darkness of River Woods. It must have been
on one of those September days when we were there in the woods gathering
roots that Dolly said: Do you hear? that is the grass harp, always telling a
story-it knows the stories of all the people on the hill, of all the people
who ever lived, and when we are dead it will tell ours, too.
After my mother died, my father, a traveling man, sent me to live with
his cousins, Verena and Dolly Talbo, two unmarried ladies who were sisters.
Before that, I'd not ever been allowed into their house. For reasons no one
ever got quite clear, Verena and my father did not speak. Probably Papa
asked Verena to lend him some money, and she refused; or perhaps she did
make the loan, and he never returned it You can be sure that the trouble was