Conclusion
Those were the last words I heard him say. He picked up his cup, drained it and soon his head fell on his chest, and he slid down in the grass. A fish broke the water’s surface at the pool’s edge, and the wind began to lisp and moan intensely, and as I listened to it moving through the trees -- at first I heard a slow willowy meter in its rhythms, and then with the ear of my heart I felt the most beautiful music. I smelled, once again, the heady aroma of liquor as it wafted on the wind, echoing the melodious trickling sound of Lady Sedgefield filling her breasts to suckle Tom, where, there in the dirt, he would seduce her as he had done me tonight. And he would guide her nipple to his snaggle-toothed mouth and smack the amber liquid, smiling as it dribbles and softens his whiskers, rinsing his crusty chin.
In a husky descant bourne aloft by gentle slips of wind, she begins to sing the lullaby of “Barbara Allen” as she rocks him to gentle oblivion, back and forth, to and fro, and in soft legato phrases, melds the music of the trees with the melody of her lips, as she lisps gentle pianissimos of Shakespeare’s music through their leaves and fronds. It goes like this -- you know the tune, come now, let’s sing together:
‘Twas in the merry month of May
When all the green buds were a swellin'
A young man on his deathbed lay
For love of Barbara Allen.
O she walked in, O she walked in
And placed her eyes upon him
And all she said when she got there
Was “My true love, you're a dyin'”.
O mother come and make my bed,
O make it straight and narrow,
For my true love had died today,
And I shall die tomorrow.
And so it was and so it is - a dream, a dream of Mahu and Obidicut, and of syncopated starlit staggers. A dream of dance at one primeval and sophisticated, whose rhetoric is shaped in fantasy, and whose gummy residue collects from the incandescent seething political fires of the nineteenth century, where they coalesce to precipitate a bereft scarecrow actor dancer, whose abounding gifts assuage his character defects, and whose addition adds dimension to the spinning of this tale. A dream tinctured by blood - coddled in the folds of seasons past - a reverie of man, of movement, of homespun tunes, and dramatic renderings, punctuated by antiphonal sounds of nature, in the postlude of an old south, whose gentle folk are her noblest expression -- with voices, that, tinged with compliments and tinted with effusive local color, compose lyrical phrases whose disarming verbiage dissolves formality’s odor, and whose soothing balms salve with conifer creams the rank canker of condescension.