For Victor Massey

Nobody knows this but your father once hit Stacker Lee upside the head with a paving stone. He was better known for hitting the basso notes in “Nearer, My called him (pug for pugilist, I gather, from the Latin for clenched fist). He always managed to talk himself clear of consequence, with some glib alibi the judge was amused to hear. He never hit you, as far as I know, which isn’t far. Instead he carried you into the back yard because you’d vomited again and shook you clear of your little life. “If that’s a child,” a neighbor told his wife, “the man has killed it,” and so he had. You were a bright but delicate lad, allegedly, mild, with a mysterious softness to your bones that reads like rickets to me, but wouldn’t they have known? They fed you only soft, mild things, rice and potatoes, which you ate readily, according to this suspect, rubbernecked reportage. The deputy coroner drew a line through “Congenital Debility” and jotted “Cause of Death Unknown” above it. You giggled and suffered for 14 months and haven’t suffered since the summer of 1892, little Victor. Senior to my great-grandfathers, you are what? Only an antique baby, broken, and the imperceptible ripples you must have sent across the surface of things, wherever they went. They buried you in Potter’s Field, universal for a stranger’s grave, although the two words together evoke, for me, a garden. Nothing connects us but having briefly lived. I’m setting this down, as they say, because I’m the only one who knows your name and it has become a burden.